THE philosopher denies religion, but only in so far as religion is mythology. He does not deny religion as faith, as reverence, as the religious attitude of mind.

Even the most critical of philosophies must become a faith at each stage in its development; that is to say, it must continually assume certain bodies of fact to be true, to be established beyond discussion, and therefore to be valid as premises and foundations for conduct. When faith is so understood, the religious spirit is not intrinsically different from it; and the two terms might well be taken as synonymous and interchangeable were it not that the word “religion” is sometimes used to bolster up a defective form of faith where the “truths” that are repeated and “professed” as beyond discussion are lifeless and inert abstractions. (When this situation becomes apparent we are invited to remedy it by turning to a more “intimate,” a more “spiritual” religion!) Whereas the truths which a real and legitimate faith embraces are essentially living truths, fruitful therefore of rich and intimately spiritual religion.

The faith or religion that blossoms and fructifies on the tree of philosophy is the consciousness a man comes to have of his oneness with the All, with true and complete and full Reality.

Many of us grow rebellious at the much that is cheap and petty in the life of the world, and we yearn for something vaguely denoted as “poetry,” for something that will take us above and away from the empirical and the temporal, and allow us to soar in the Absolute and the Eternal. But one might ask: what poetry is conceivable apart from a truly religious consciousness? Any other kind of poetry, in its fancied transcendence of the contingent and the temporal, reduces everything to the contingent and temporal, making the cheapness and the pettiness of life more intolerable still. Disappointed in its search, it is left impotent with empty hands.

Others of us again aspire to the superhuman, But if there is anything seriously thinkable in such an aspiration, what does it seek except the supremely human—not the superhuman, that is, but the superindividual, the truly ethical?

And others still would be heroic. But what is heroism, fundamentally—as it appears in its fully evolved idea, and not merely in some of its more spectacular and striking manifestations? Is it anything but a continuous and continual re-submission to the All, a surrender which the reverent soul is making at every moment, in the little things as in the big things, now with slight efforts, now with gigantic ones?

And religion, which thus proves to be poetry, and superindividuality, and heroism, is also harmony! Of true harmony we gather only a few secondary and illusory benefits when we seek it in the external forms of observances, of deportment, of words. We have real harmony only as we attain it at the sources whence it springs, only as we understand it as a unity of thought with feeling and action, and as a unity of feeling and action with thought. It comes to us only as everything that is thought in us becomes a principle of action (or at least modifies action to some extent); and as everything we do in our lives presents itself to us as a problem of thought. It comes to us only as, progressively, we become conscious of ourselves, know ourselves and the conditions under which we act, and as we act in conformity with our knowledge, acquiring a transparent self-consciousness of all we do, criticising it, passing judgment on it. All this and only this is harmony. This and only this can give us true reverence, true religion.

Since religion is harmony it is also aristocracy. The mob, the crowd, the vulgus, properly so called, from which only the man of prudentia is to be excluded, is inharmonious: it thinks one thing and desires another, it desires one thing and does another. The mass of people is not only discordant and inharmonious with itself: it is wholly absorbed in its narrow and unilateral individuality. Prosaic, anti-heroic, it does not see true individuality in the Eternal; and it consoles itself for this blindness by ridiculing the Eternal, whether the latter blaze before its eyes in the words and deeds of the great, or tower on the horizons as a lofty and inaccessible mountain in the philosophies. Such derision, in all the gibes and sarcasms it has invented, may have the semblance of mental keenness and aristocracy. But it will be a false keenness and a false aristocracy, as readily detected as the vulgarity of the bumpkin, who cannot become a man of the world by putting on a top hat and fashionable clothes.

The age in which we are now living has been accused of destroying the religions in which human life had found its logic, its rules of conduct, its safe and sound stability. But the indictment cannot stand. In doing what it has done, our age has done something it could not help doing. In the process of dismantling religion as mythology, it was inevitable that many valuable pieces of the old structures would fall to the ground—precious thoughts and priceless virtues which had become attached to mythological dogmas. But these our time has made haste to gather up again; and it has worked them back, cleaned, repolished, restored, into a stronger, firmer, vaster, more noble edifice. It will be the glory of our generation if we shall succeed in founding a human religion, a pure faith, a pure religious spirit, born of thought, but of a thought embodying life and fertile of new life.

A human religion, I say, but not the “religion of humanity.” The latter was founded long ago by the super-national mythologies of universal redemption which succeeded the religions of races, tribes, peoples, or nations, and which—Christianity supreme among them—tried to be catholic or world-wide. The human religion I mean must be anti-mythological and free from all remnants of naturalism and utilitarianism. It must be pure religion, a religion which, placing God in the hearts of men, will be not only humanity’s religion but man’s religion.

At the present time we are witnessing the travail that presages the birth of such a religion; and in those painful throes we all are having our share. The old mythologies vigorously reassert themselves from time to time; and they provoke anew the negative, irreligious criticism which fulfilled so necessary a function in the past. Against the sterility and the violence and the prejudice of the mythologies rise the sterility, the violence, and the prejudice of the improvised anti-religions of a rationalistic, intellectualistic, or utilitarian character. But in spite of everything, man will have his God again—the God that is worthy of man’s new estate. For without religion, that is to say, without poetry, without heroism, without a consciousness of universality, without harmony, without the aristocratic spirit, no society can endure.

And human society is determined to endure. If for no other reason, for this reason: that it cannot perish!