"The desire of the moth for the star,Of the day for the morrow,The longing for something afarFrom the scene of our sorrow."
"The desire of the moth for the star,Of the day for the morrow,The longing for something afarFrom the scene of our sorrow."
It is the result of high emotional power withno food to feed on. There are other factors, for instance—that people who live in mountains are more superstitious than people of plains, due again to narrower, more isolated lives, I think; and as a rule country people are more superstitious than town people, due to the same reason. Nothing exists without its use, and this is some of the use of the miraculous instinct in man. It has played its part in the world, a great part no doubt. Where it exists still it does so because it fills a necessity. Never doubt it. Those who live full lives find it so easy to laugh at this craving for the supernatural. Would you do away with it? Make, then, their lives such that they do not need it. Give to them the knowledge, the sympathy, the love, the wider life that makes it unnecessary.
Nurtured in narrowness on the ground that should grow other instincts, it disappears in the sunshine of happiness, when the heart is furrowed and tilled by the experiences of life and planted with the fruit of happiness.
If we cannot do that, at least we can recognise that it, as all instincts, has its uses, and exists in and because of that use, never because of any abuse.
And where the instinct exists it is attracted asare nearly all the instincts into that great bundle of emotions called religion.
But if those who support Christian missions wonder why they are not more successful, here is another reason. What satisfies your instinct revolts theirs. They do not require it. Orientals, even peasants, live such wide lives compared with many in the West, that they need not the stimulus, and their hard lives lessen the emotional powers. And if Christians are often unable to understand the charm of Buddhism to its believers, it is because western people seek and require the stimulus of miracle which is here wanting. It is as if you offered them water while they cared only for wine. But Easterns care not for your strong emotions. They are simpler and more easily pleased.
"This is not the place, nor have I space left here, to explain all I mean when I say that art is a mode of religion, and can flourish only under the inspiration of living and practical religion."—Frederic Harrison."No one indeed can successfully uphold the idea that the high development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong growth of religious or moral sentiment. Perugino made no secret of being an atheist; Leonardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of Praxiteles, Apelles, and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation, lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result of a faith that has been."—Marion Crawford.
"This is not the place, nor have I space left here, to explain all I mean when I say that art is a mode of religion, and can flourish only under the inspiration of living and practical religion."—Frederic Harrison.
"No one indeed can successfully uphold the idea that the high development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong growth of religious or moral sentiment. Perugino made no secret of being an atheist; Leonardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of Praxiteles, Apelles, and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation, lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result of a faith that has been."—Marion Crawford.
Quotation on both sides could be multiplied without end, but there seems no reason to do so. The question is the relation of religion to art, and it has but the two sides. Indeed, the subject seems difficult, for there is so much to be said on both sides.
On one side it may be said:—Art is the result of and the outcome of religion. Look at the greatest works of art the world has to show. Are they not all religious? There are the Parthenon, the temples of Karnac, the cathedral at Milan, St. Peter's at Rome, and others too numerous to mention; the Mosque of St. Sophia and the Kutub Minar, the temples of Humpi, the Shwe Dagon pagoda, the temples of China and Japan. What has secular art to show to compare with these? Are not the Venus de Milo, the statue of Athena, and all the famous Greek sculptures those of gods? What is the most famous painting in the world? It is the Sistine Madonna of Raphael. Even in literature, is there anything secular to compare with the sacred books of the world? The oratorios and masses are the finest music. What can be more certain than that only religion gives the necessary stimulus to art and furnishes the most inspiring subjects? Great art is born of great faiths, great faiths produce great art.
To which there is the reply:—Many of the greatest Greek statues were of gods truly, but was it a religious age that produced them? Were Phidias and Zeuxis religious or moral men?
Was the thirteenth century which saw thebuilding of most of the best cathedrals, a religious age? Is it not the fact that for many cathedrals the capital was borrowed from the Jews, enemies of Christ, and the interest paid by the sweat of slaves; and when the interest was too heavy, religious bigotry was resorted to and the Jews persecuted, killed, and banished. It is probable that of all ages the thirteenth century was the worst. Were the painters of great pictures religious or moral? Raphael painted the most wonderful religious paintings the world has seen—how much religion had Raphael? Leonardo da Vinci painted "The Last Supper"; he was a sceptic. Are not artistic people notoriously irreligious? The pyramids of Egypt and the Taj at Agra are not religious buildings; they are tombs. The sentiment that raised them was the emotion of death. In music and literature secular art rivals religion. And even if great art be allied to religion, deep religious feeling does not necessarily produce art. Indeed, it is the reverse. The most serious forms of belief have not done so. Where is the art of the Reformation? Protestants will be slow to admit that there was no deep religious feeling there. Yet their great cathedrals were all built by Roman Catholics. Were not the Puritans religious?They hated all art. Is there no religious feeling in the North of America? Where is its religious art? In Europe there is no religious art out of Catholicism. In that alone has it succeeded. And again, although some religious art is great, such is the exception. The bulk of religious art all over the world is bad—very bad—the worst. What art is there in the crucifixes of the Catholic world, in the sacred pictures in their chapels, in the eikons of Russia, in the gods of the Hindus, in the Buddhas of Buddhism, and the popular religious pictures of England? They are one and all as Art simply deplorable. There is grand religious literature, but what of the bulk of it? Most of the hymns, the sermons, the tracts, the religious literature of England and other countries cannot be matched for badness in any secular work. It is the same everywhere. The Salvation Army had to borrow secular music to make its hymns attractive. Striking an average, which is best—secular or religious literature, art, music, and architecture? Without a doubt secular art is the best all round.
Art may often be the representative of religion, it is never the outcome of religious people or a religious age. The very contrary is the fact.
These are strong arguments, and there are more. But these will suffice.
What is the truth? What connection has art with religion?
I do not think the answer is difficult. The connection depends upon what you define religion and art respectively to be. With the old definitions no answer is forthcoming. But when you see religion as it really is, when you understand its genesis and its growth, the answer is clear.
Religion, as I have tried to show, arises from instincts. The instincts of the savage are few, the emotions he is capable of feeling are limited. As his civilisation progresses his instinctive desires increase, his emotions are more numerous. And as the greater attracts the less, the older and more established attract the newer, so religion attracts to itself and incorporates all it can. Religions have varied in this matter; but of all, Catholicism has been the most wide-armed, it has always justified its name. Where a new emotion arose and became strong the Roman Church always if possible attracted it into the fold. I have already shown how this was done. There is hardly an emotion of the human heart that Roman Catholicism has not made its own.
Now what is Art?
Art, as Tolstoi explains, is also an expression of the emotions, and therefore the difference between religion and art lies in the emotions expressed and the method of expression.
Different peoples express in their religions different emotions. What some of these emotions are I explain in Chapter XXX. Different people are also more or less susceptible to art, and express in their art different emotions. Where a great religion has absorbed certain emotions, and a great art subsequently arises and wishes to express in art some of the same emotions, then the art becomes religious art. The two domains have overlapped. But there is no distinction between secular and religious art. Nor is there any necessary connection between Art and Religion. Neither is dependent on the other. They are quite distinct domains, each existing to fulfil the necessities and desires of man.
How they came frequently to overlap is easily enough seen.
Consider the religion of Rome. It came, as I have said, out of the necessity for expressing and cultivating certain emotions. It is a very catholic religion, the product of a highly emotional people who had many and strongfeelings. As much as possible these were accepted into the religion.
Therefore, when there came the great outbreak of art in the fourteenth century, when there were great painters and sculptors desiring to paint pictures that appealed to the heart, all the ground was occupied.
Did they want to depict feminine beauty, there was the Madonna accepted as the ideal. Did they want to awaken the emotion of maternity, there was the Madonna again; of pity, there were the martyrs; of sacrifice, there was the Christ. Long before these emotions had been crystallised by the Church round religious ideals, and a change would not be understood.
And with the Architects. There is but one emotion common to a whole people—catholic, so to speak—namely, religion. A town hall, a palace, a secular building would be provincial; a church only is catholic. In palaces only princes live, in municipal buildings only officials, in markets only the people, but in churches all are gathered together, and not only occasionally but frequently. Therefore, given a great architect, what could he design that would give him scope, and freedom, and fame like a cathedral? His feelings were immaterial, it was a professional necessity that drove artists then to religiousmatters. What was Raphael, the free-liver, thinking of when he drew his Madonnas? Was it the Jewess of Galilee over a thousand years before or the ripe warm beauty of the Florentine girls he knew?
The Roman Catholic Church desired to attract to itself all that appealed to the emotions, and included art of all kinds in its scope. And all artists, painters, architects, even writers, found in the Church their greatest opportunities and greatest fame. Deep and real feelings in art of all kinds sought the companionship of the other great feelings that are in religion. Shallower art often shrinks from being put beside the greater emotions, and so some of the shams of the Renaissance.
But the deepest religious feeling is always averse to art. No age full of great religious emotion has produced any art at all in any people. The early Christians, the monks of the Thebaid, hated art, as did the Puritans. They felt, I think, a competition. When an emotion is raised to such a height as theirs was, none other can live beside it. Such emotion becomes a flame that burns up all round. It cannot bear any rivalry. It puts aside not only art but love, reverence, fear, every other emotion. Religion is before everything, religioniseverything.There are Christ's words refusing to recognise his mother and brethren. It has been common to all forms of exalted religious fervour. No emotion can live with it. Only when it has somewhat died away does art get a chance. Then only if an artistic wave arises can it be allied with religion. But deep religious feeling is not always followed by an artistic wave. There has been no such sequence in most countries. This sequence in Italy was an exception. It was perchance. There has never been an art wave connected with Protestantism, and only very slightly with Buddhism. I have shown in "The Soul of a People," that art in Burma is only connected professionally with Buddhism. That is to say that wood-carving, one of Burma's two arts, is not religious in sentiment, and is applied to monasteries because they are the only large buildings needed. There is no other demand. To depict the Buddha in any artistic way except that handed down by tradition would be considered profane. Would not the early Christians have considered Raphael's Madonna profane, considering who he was, and what probably his models were? I think so. I doubt if the deepest religious emotions would tolerate a crucifix or any picture of Christ at all. Certainly not of the Almighty. The heat of belief musthave cooled down a great deal before such things became possible. So, in fact, it is as history tells us. Religion is a cult of the emotions. Art, as Tolstoi shows, is also a cult of the emotions. Very deep religious feeling leaves no room for any other emotion, it brooks no rival in the hearts of men. A deeply religious age has no art; its religion kills art. What were the feelings of the early Christians towards Greek art? They were those of abhorrence. What those of the Puritans towards any art? They were the same.
But when religious emotions have cooled, and room is left for other feelings, then art may arise. And if it does so, and is a great art, it allies itself with religion, if the religion permits of it. Some forms of faith would never permit it. Which of the emotions of which Puritanism is composed could be expressed in art? Art is almost always the cult of emotions that are beautiful, are happy, are joyous. Puritanism knew nothing of all these. Grand, stern, rigid, black, never graceful or beautiful. Any art that followed Puritanism could but be grotesque and terrible. There would be no Madonnas, but there might be avenging angels; there would be no heaven, but certainly a hell. Indeed, in the literature of the religion we see that this is so.
Religion and art are both cults of the emotions. They may be rivals, they may be allies, in the way that art may depict religious subjects. But great art, like great faith, brooks no rival. And therefore great artists are not necessarily religious. They may have scant emotion to spare outside their art.
This, I think, is the key to the relation between religion and art. It is impossible to treat such a great subject adequately in a chapter. Most of my chapters should, indeed, have been volumes. But the key once provided the rest follows.
If you go to any believer in any religion—in any of the greater religions, I mean—and ask him why he believes in his religion, he has always one answer: "Because it is true." And if you continue and say to him, "How do you know it is true?" he will reply, "Because there is full evidence to prove it." He imagines that he is guided by his reason, that it is his logical faculty that is satisfied, and his religion can be proved irrefragably. And yet it is strange that if any religion is based on ascertained fact, if any religion is demonstrably true, no one can be brought to see this truth, to accept this proof, except believers who do not require it. The Jew cannot be brought to admit the truth of Christianity, let the Christian argue ever so wisely; nor will the Christian accept Mahommedanism or Buddhism as containing any truth at all, no matter how the adherents of these faiths may argue.
It is not so with most other matters. If a problem in chemistry or physics be true at all it is altogether true for every one. Nationality makes no difference to your acknowledging the law of gravity, the science of the stars, the dynamics of steam, or the secrets of metallurgy. If an Englishman makes a discovery a Frenchman is able to follow the argument. The Japanese are not Christians, but that does not in any way prevent them assimilating modern knowledge. Twice two are four all over the world, except in matters of religion.
This is a somewhat remarkable phenomenon. What is the reason of it?
I can remember not very long ago walking in a garden with a man and talking intermittently on religious topics. He was a man of great education, of wide knowledge of the world, a man of no narrow sympathies or thoughts. And as we went we came to a bed of roses in full bloom; there were red and white and deep yellow roses in clusters of great beauty, filling the air with their perfume. "To see a sight like that," he said, "proves to me that there is a God."
Proves! There was theproof.
I did not ask him how such roses would be proof of a God. I did not say that if beauty was proof of a God, ugliness would be proof of a Devil,for I know there is no reasoning in matters like that. The sight and scent awoke in his heart that echo that is called God. Not only God, nor was it any God, nor any Gods that the echo answered to. It washisGod, it was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that came to him. He saw the roses, and their beauty brought to his mind the idea of God. That was enough for him. He had, as so many have, an absolute instinctive understanding of God, as clear to him as if he saw Him at midday—unreasoning becauseknown.
"And for others," he said, "is there not ample evidence? How do you account for the world unless God made it? Have we not in the Scripture a full account of how it was made out of chaos? And has not He manifested Himself in His prophets? The truth is proved over and over again, by the prophecies and fulfilment, by the birth and death of Christ, by the miracles of Christ, by endless matters. It is so clear." And so it is to him and those like him who have in themselves the idea of God. Theyknow. It seems humorous to remember that scientific men have thought they traced this to a savage's speculations on dreams. The speculation of a savage, forsooth, and this certainty of feeling. The Theist says: "How can you answer the questions of who made the world other than byGod?" It is a question that rises spontaneously. Do you remember Napoleon the Great and the idealogues on the voyage to Egypt? They were ridiculing the idea of a Creator. And to them the Emperor, pointing to the stars above him, replied, "It is all very well, gentlemen, but who made all those?" But the Non-Theist replies that it would never occur to him to put such a question. To ask "Who made the world?" is to beg the whole question. That question which is always rising in your mind never does in ours. We would ask how and from what has the world evolved, and under what cause? "Your evidence is good only to you." The Hindu has perhaps the keenest mind in religious matters the world knows; does he accept it? Do the Buddhists accept it? Do keen thinkers in Europe accept any of this evidence? It is not so. If you have the instinct of God, then is evidence unnecessary; and if you have not, of what use is the evidence brought forward? Was anyone ever converted by reasoning? I am sure no one ever was. Religions are not proved, they are not matters of logic; they are either above logic or beneath it. To a man whobelieves, anything is proof. He will reason about religion in a way he would never do about other matters. He will offer as evidence, as absolute proof, what he who does not believecannot accept as evidence at all. The religions are always the same. The believersknowthem to be true, and they cannot understand why others also do not know it. Their truths seem to them absolutely clear, capable of the clearest proof. And as to this evidence, this proof, there is always plenty of it. Any faith can if pushed bring evidence on some points that not even unbelievers can disprove, that is clearly not intentionally false, that if the matter were a mundane concern would probably be accepted. It is so, I think, in all religions, but here is a case from Buddhism.
In my book upon the religion of the Burmese I have given a chapter to the belief of the people in reincarnation, a belief that is to them not a belief but a knowledge. And I have given there a few of these strange stories of remembrance of previous lives so common among them. For almost all children will tell you that they can remember their former lives.
There is a story there of a child who remembered nothing until one day he saw used as a curtain a man's loin-cloth, that of a man who had died and whose clothes had, as is the custom, been made into screens. And the sight of that pattern awoke in him suddenly the knowledge that he had lived before, and that in that former life he had worn that very cloth. His former life was "proved" tohim, and in consequence the fact that all men had former lives. There was proof.
When I was writing "The Soul of a People" I went a great deal into this subject of the former life, and I collected a great deal of evidence about it. I not only saw a number of people who said they could recollect these lives, but I came across a quantity of facts difficult of explanation on any other hypothesis. The evidence was honestly given, I know. But did I believe this former life, or has any European ever been convinced by that evidence? I never heard of one. Why? Because we have not the instinct. The Burman has.
They have the idea as an instinct, just as my friend held the idea of God as an instinct, and there were certain matters that awakened these instincts. They needed no more; the facts were proved to them and to those of like thought to them. But proof. What is proof? Proof, they will tell you, is a matter of evidence, it is a matter of cold logic, it arises from facts.
If that is so, why does not everyone believe in ghosts? Was there ever a subject on which there was more evidence than in the existence of ghosts? We find the belief as far back as we can go—the witch of Endor, for instance. We find the belief to-day. Not a year passes butnumerous people assert that they have seen ghosts. Their evidence is honestly given; no one doubts that. The mass of evidence is overwhelming. The fact that certain people do not see them in no way invalidates the direct evidence. Yet the belief in ghosts is a joke, and a mark, we say, of feeble-minded folk.
I have myself lived in the midst of ghosts. One of my houses in Burma was full of them. Every Burman who came in saw them. Not even my servants dared go upstairs after dark without me. My servants are honest, truth-telling boys, and I would believe them in a matter of theft or murder without hesitation. I would certainly hang a man if the evidence of his being a murderer was as clear as the evidence that my bedroom contained a ghost. No absolutely impartial lawyer, judging the evidence of former life and of the existence of ghosts as a pure matter of law, but would admit that they were conclusively proved. The Burmans firmly believe both, considering them not only proved but beyond proof. No European believes in the former life, and with regard to ghosts the belief is relegated to those whom we stigmatise as the weak-minded and imaginative.
Is the explanation difficult? It does not seem to me so. For it is simply this. To believe andaccept any matter it is not sufficient that there be enough evidence, the subject itself must appeal to you, must ring true, must be good to be believed. But with ghosts to most of us it is the reverse. That our friends and those we love should after death behave as ghosts behave, should be silly, unreasonable, drivelling in their ways, imbecile in their performances, should in fact act as if the next world was a ghostly lunatic asylum, is not attractive but the reverse. For a murdered man's spirit to go fooling about scaring innocent people into fits, and unable to say right out that he wants his body buried, strikes the ordinary man as sheer idiocy. And therefore men laugh and jeer. People who see ghosts may believe them; no one else will do so. Because they are not worthy of belief. If these be indeed ghosts, and they act as ghost-seers say, it is a deplorable, a most deplorable thing. And if it is a choice of imbecilities, we would prefer to believe in the lunacy of ghost-seers rather than in that of the dead, our dead.
But it is not only in matters relating to religion as the idea of God, or to the supernatural as in ghosts, that we reject evidence. We can do so also in matters that have no connection with each. For why do we refuse to accept the sea serpent? Numbers of absolutely reliable men declare theyhave seen it. And yet we laugh, or at best we say, "They were mistaken, it was a trail of seaweed."
All men who have lived to a certain age have learnt that there are certain facts, certain experiences not at all connected with the supernatural, which they dare not tell of for fear of being put down as inventors. They are curious coincidences, narrow escapes, shooting adventures, and so on. They have happened to us all. Who has not heard the tale of the general at a dinner party who related some such incident that had occurred to himself, and was surprised to see amusement and disbelief depicted on the faces of all around him. "You do not believe me," he said stiffly, "but my friend opposite was with me at the time and saw it too." But the friend refused with a laugh to bear witness, and the conversation changed. "General," explained the friend subsequently to his irate companion, "I know, of course, all you said was true. But what would you have? If fifty men swore to it no one would believe them. They would only have put me down as a liar too."
Just as the old woman was ready to accept her travelled son's yarns of rivers of milk and islands of cheese; but when he deviated into the truth she stopped. "Na, Na!" she said, "that theanchor fetched up one of Pharaoh's chariot wheels out of the Red Sea, I can believe; but that fish fly! Na, Na! dinna come any o' your lies over yer mither."
They are old stories, but they illustrate my point. On some matters we are ready to believe at once, on others no amount of evidence will change our opinions.
Indeed, we are too apt to assume that reason is our great guide in life. To think before you act may be wise—sometimes. But if in matters of emergency you had to stop and think first, you would not succeed very well. The great men of action are those who act first and think afterwards, and sometimes they even do the latter badly. There is the story of a man who was going abroad to be a Chief Justice, and who was addressed by the Lord Chancellor in this way: "My friend, be careful where you are going. Your judgments will be nearly always right, but beware of giving your reasons, for they will almost invariably be wrong." There are many such men.
What, then, is religious proof? If it is not founded on evidence that all can accept, on what is it founded? Why do men believe their own religion and accept the evidence of it as irrefragable, while scornfully rejecting that in favour of other religions?
The answer, I think, is this.
If you will take two violins and will tune them together, and if while someone plays ever so lightly on one you will bend your ear to the other, you will hear faintly but clearly repeated from its strings the melody of the first. For they are in harmony. But if they are not, then there will be no echo, play you never so loudly.
And so it is in matters of religion. If you are in harmony with any thought there will come the echo in your heart's strings, and you will know that it is true. But if you are not in harmony, then no matter how loudly the evidence be sounded there will be no echo there. All these ideas on which religions are built are instincts. They are of the heart, never of the head. Reason affects them not at all. These instincts are not the same with all. They vary, and so the religions that are based on them vary. They have nothing to do with reason, and therefore those of one religion cannot understand another. And they are not fixed; for the belief in the Unity of God only evolved, after many thousands of years, quite recently, and the belief in ghosts, universal among earlier people and now among the half-civilized, lingers with us only as a subject for amusement. There is no "evidence" in religion; you either believe or you don't.
It is two years and a half ago now that I passed through Westminster Hall, one of a great multitude. They went in double file, thickly packed between barriers of rails on either side the hall, and between where everyone looked there lay—what? A plain oak coffin on a table.
Within this coffin there lay the body of Mr. Gladstone, he who in his day had filled the public eye in England more than any other man. His body lay there in state, and the people came to see.
Emerging into the street beyond and seeing the ceaseless stream of people that flowed past, I wondered to myself. These people are Christians. If you ask them where Mr. Gladstone is now, they will, if they reply hurriedly, answer, "He is dead and in there"; but if they pauseto reflect they will say, "He is in heaven. His soul is with God."
If, then, his soul, ifhebe with God, what are you come to see? Shortly there will be a funeral, and what will it be called? The funeral of Mr. Gladstone. But Mr. Gladstone is in heaven, not here. Surely this is strange.
"If there is anything I can do for you be sure you tell me, for your husband was my great friend." So wrote the man. And to him came her reply: "Sometimes when you are near go and see his grave where he sleeps in that far land, and put a flower upon it for your remembrance and for mine."
But if he, too, be in heaven and not there at all? If it be, as the Burmans say, but the empty shell that lies there? Why should we visit graves if the soul be indeed separate from the body? If he be far away in happiness, why go to his grave? To remember but the corruption that lies beneath?
Men use words and phrases remembering what they ought to believe. For very few are sincere and know what really they do believe. You cannot tell from their professions, only from their unconscious words and their acts.
What do these unconscious words, these acts,tell us of the belief about the soul and body? That they are separable and separate? No, but that they are inseparable. No one in the West, I am sure—no one anywhere, I think—has ever been able to conceive of the soul as apart from the body. We cannot do so. Try, try honestly, and remember your dead friends. What is it you recall and long for and miss so bitterly? It was his voice that awoke echoes in you, it was the clasp of his hand in yours, it was his eyes looking back to you the love you felt for him. It was his footfall on the stair, his laugh, the knowledge of his presence. And are not these all of the body?
Men talk glibly of the soul as apart from the body. What do they mean? Nothing but words, for the soul without a body is an incomprehensible thing, certainly to us.
And it is always the same body, not another. It is the old hand, the face, that we want. Not the soul, if it could be possible, looking at us out of other eyes. No; we want him we lost, and not another. It is the cry of our hearts.
And therefore, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Have you wondered how that came into the creed? It came into religion as came allthat we believe in, never out of theory but out of instinct.
What is your feeling towards the dead? Is it envy that they have reached everlasting happiness? Is it gladness to reflect that they are no longer with us? Do we think of them as superior to us? Alas, no. The great and overpowering sentiment we have for them is pity. The tears come to our eyes for them, because they are dead. They have left behind them light and life and gone into the everlasting forgetfulness. "The night hath come when no man can work." That is our real instinct towards the dead. "Poor fellow." And you will hear people say, with tardy remembrance of their creeds, "But for his sake we ought to rejoice, because he is at peace."
We ought? Butdowe? Surely we never do. We are sorry for the dead. All the compassion that is in us goes out to them, because they are dead.
The Catholic Church has prayers for the dead. There was never a Church yet that knew the hearts of men as that Church of Rome. Prayers for the dead. Masses for the dead.
Our Protestant theories forbid such. But tell me, is there a woman who has lost those she loves to whom such prayers would not comehome? How narrow sometimes are the Reformed Creeds in their refusal to help the sorrow of their people.
"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with God. What is to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead—who sleeps; he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Notabody, butthebody. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body. They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it must be together. For they are one.
Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?
But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of souls. They pass from body to body. He can realise this—somehow, I know not—but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember that they not only believe it butknowit. They are sure of it because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body, but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in another, as a lamp shining through different globes.
Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?" Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has passed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last weary body done with, then life, too, is gone—life and all passion, all love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.
Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts. Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our heaven, where we shall recognise eachother and love them as we did. I did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but sympathy will tell you all things.
It would be interesting, it is very interesting, to look back into our past histories and see these instincts grow and wane, to mark how they have influenced not only our religious theories, but our lives; to trace in other people like or opposed instincts. The Mahommedans refuse amputation because they will not appear maimed in the next world. For they, too, cannot distinguish soul from one body. The Jews had no idea of soul at all as existing after death, whether with or without a body. "As a man dies so will he be, all through the ages of eternity." They learned the idea of immortality from Egypt, but it never took root because they had no instinctive feeling of soul. Their witches were foreigners. "You shall not suffer a witch to live." The incantation of ghosts was utterly forbidden by them as a foreign wickedness. It has so been forbidden byallreligions. Yet there are people who think religions arise from ideas of ghosts.
The African negroes have no idea of life after death, as witness the story of Dr. Livingstoneand the negro king about the seed. It is a very curious history this of the longing for immortality, the belief in a life beyond the grave.
But I am not now concerned with the past only with the present. The history of instincts is never the explanation of them. If we could unravel clearly all the history of the instincts of all peoples as regards the after death, we should be no nearer an explanation of why the instinct exists at all, why it grows or decays, why it takes one form or another. But we might, as so many do, blind ourselves to the fact that instincts exist now quite apart from reason, either now or previously. No reasoning can explain the absolute clinging of the European peoples to the resurrection of the body. No reasoning can possibly explain the Burman's remembrance of previous lives. Reasoning would deny both. Observation and sympathy know that both exist.
And which is true? No one can tell.
"Not one returns to tell us of the RoadWhich to discover we must travel too."
"Not one returns to tell us of the RoadWhich to discover we must travel too."
For some years now there has been a movement in England to introduce cremation as a method of disposing of the dead. There can be no doubt of its sanitary superiority to burial;there can be no doubt that, as far as reason and argument go, cremation should be preferred to the grave. There seems to be absolutely no good reason to bring forward in favour of the latter. And yet cremation makes no way. Men die and they are buried, and if over their tombs we do not now write "Hic jacet," but "In memory of," our ideas have suffered no change.
We cannot bear to burn the bodies of the dead because we cannot disassociate the body from the soul. The body is to rise, and if we burn it, what then? What will there be to rise? Man has but one body and one soul dwelling therein, and if you destroy the body the soul is dead too.
Only people who believe in the transmigration of souls burn their dead—the Hindus and, in Burma, the monks of Buddha. They see no objection to the destruction of the body because the soul is migratory, and has passed into another. What is left after death is but the "empty shell."
Therefore do Hindus and Buddhists cremate, whereas Christians and Mahommedans bury. Nor does rejection of creed alter this instinct. Intellectual France boasts of its freedom from religion. Butisit free? Has it outgrown theinstincts that are the root of religion? One certainly it has not yet done, for secularists are buried just as believers are, usually with the same rites. And even if the funeral be secular, the body is buried, not burnt. Why do they shrink from cremation if reason is to be the only guide? The creed is outworn but the roots of faith are never dead.
Thus are the heavens of all religions explanations to materialise, as it were, the vague instincts of men's hearts. The Mahommedan's absolutely material garden of the houris, the Christian semi-material heaven, the Buddhist absolutely immaterial Nirvana, are all outcomes of the people's capability of separating soul from body. These heavens are just as the dogmas of Godhead, or Law, or Atonement, but the theory to explain the fact, which is in this case the desire for immortality. And in exactly the same way as the theories of other matters are unsatisfying, so are these theories of heaven. The desire for immortality is there, one of the strongest of all the emotions; but the ideal which the theologian offers to the believer to fulfil his desire has no attraction. The more it is defined the less anyone wants it. Heaven we would all go to, but notthatheaven. The instinct is true, but the theory which would materialise the aim of thatdesire is false. No heaven that has been pictured to any believer is desirable.
It is strange to see in this but another instance of the invincible pessimism of the human reason. No matter to what it turns itself it is always the same.
I have read all the Utopias, from Plato's New Republic to Bellamy's, from the Anarchist's Paradise to that of the Socialists, and I confess that I have always risen from them with one strong emotion. And that was, the relief and delight that never in my time—never, I am sure, in any time—can any one of them be realised. This world as it exists, as it has existed, may have its drawbacks. There is crime, and misfortune, and unhappiness, more than need be. There are tears far more than enough. But there is sunshine too; and if there be hate there is love, if there is sorrow there is joy. Here there is life. But in these drab Utopias of the reason, what is there? That which is the worst of all to bear—monotony tending towards death.
No one, I think, can study philosophy, that grey web of the reason, without being oppressed by its utter pessimism. No matter what the philosophy be, whether it be professedly a pessimism as Schopenhauer's or not, there is no difference. It is all dull, weary barrenness, with none of thelight of hope there. Hope and beauty and happiness are strangers to that twilight country. They could not live there. Like all that is beautiful and worth having, they require light and shadow, sunshine and the dark.
And the lives of philosophers, what do they gain from the reason alone? Is there anyone who, after reading the life of any philosopher, would not say, "God help me from such." What did his unaided reason give him? Pessimism, and pessimism, and again pessimism. No matter who your philosopher is—Horace or Omar Khayyam, or Carlyle or Nietsche:—where is the difference? See how Huxley even could not stifle his desire for immortality that no reason could justify. What has reason to offer me? Only this, resignation to the worst in the world, and of it knows nothing.
To which it would be replied:
And religion, what has that to offer either here or in the next world? For in this world they declare—at least Christianity and Buddhism both declare—that nothing is worth having. It is all vanity and vexation, fraud and error and wickedness, to be quickly done with. The philosopher has Utopias of sorts here, but these two religions have no Utopia, no happiness at all here to offer. All this life is denounced as a continued misery.
And you say that neither heaven nor Nirvana appeal to men, that men shrink from them. If philosophy be pessimism, what then is religion? Do you consider the Christian theory of the fall of man, the sacrifice of God to God, the declaration that the vast majority of men are doomed to everlasting fire, a cheerful theory?
Do you consider the Buddhist theory that life is itself an evil to be done with, that no consciousness survives death, but only the effects of a man's actions, an optimism?
Philosophies may not be very cheerful, but what are religions? Whatever charge you may bring against philosophy, it can be ten times repeated of any religion. Compared with any religious theory, even Schopenhauer's philosophy is a glaring optimism.
To which I would answer, No!
I do not agree, because what you call religion I call only a reasoning about religion. The dogmas and creeds are not religion. They are summaries of the reasons that men give to explain those facts of life which are religion, just as philosophies are summaries of the theories men make to explain other facts of life. Both creeds and philosophies come from the reason. They are speculations, not facts. They are pessimistic twins of the brain. Religion is a different matter.It is a series of facts. What facts these are I have tried to shew chapter by chapter, and they are summarised in Chapter XXX., at the end. I will not anticipate it. What I am concerned with is whether religion is pessimistic or not. Never mind the dogmas and creeds; come to facts. When you read books written by men who are really religious, what is their tone? You may never agree with what is urged in them, but can you assert that they are pessimistic? It seems to me, on the contrary, that they are the reverse.
And when you know people who are religious—not fanatics, but those men and women of sober minds who take their faith honestly and sincerely as a part of life, but not the whole—are they pessimistic? I am not speaking of any religion in particular, but of all religions. Can you see religious people, and live with them and hear them talk, and watch their lives, and not recognise that religion is to them a strength, a comfort, and resource against the evils of life? Never mind what the creeds say; watch what the believersdo. Is life to them a sorry march to be made with downcast eyes of thought, to be trod with weary steps, to be regarded with contempt? The men who act thus are philosophers, not religious people.
To those who are really religious, life is beautiful. It is a triumphal march made to musicthat fills their ears, that brightens their eyes, that lightens their steps, now quicker, now slower, now sad, now joyous, always beautiful. Who are the happy men and women in this world? Let no one ever doubt—no one who has observed the world will ever doubt; they are the people who have religion. No matter what the religion is, no matter what the theory or dogma or creed, no matter the colour or climate, there is no difference. If you doubt, go and see. Never sit in your closet and study creeds and declare "No man can be happy who believes such," but go and see whether they are happy. Go to all the peoples of the world, and having put aside your prejudices, having tuned your heart-strings to theirs, listen and you will know. Watch and you will see. What is the keynote of the life of him who truly believes? Is it disgust, weariness, pessimism? Is it not courage and a strange triumph that marks his way in life? And who are those who go through life sadly, who find it terrible in its monotony, who have lost all savour for beauty, whom the sunlight cannot gladden, who neither love nor hate, neither fear nor rejoice, neither laugh nor cry? I will tell you who they are. There are two kinds, who think they are different, but are the same.
First, there are those who call themselvesphilosophers, men who have abandoned all religion and accepted "barren reason." For reason cannot make you love or hate, or laugh or weep. There is no beauty there, no light and shadow, no colour, only the greyness of unliving outline.
And there are those who mistake what religion is. They think it consists of creeds. They do not know it consists of emotions. And so they take their creeds to their hearts, and see what they make of them! Or they, abandoning their creeds, search all through the world to find new creeds. They speculate on Nirvana, on Brahm, on the doctrine of Averroes. They are for ever digging out some abstruse problem from the sacred books of the world to make themselves miserable over.
They, too, are the victims of a barren reason.
But religion is not reason; it is fact. It is beyond and before all reason. Religion is not what you say, but what you feel; not what you think, but what you know. Religions are the great optimisms. Each is to its believers "the light of the world."
I cannot think how this has not been evident long ago to everyone. Have men no eyes, no ears, no understanding? Yes, perhaps they have all these things. But what they have not got is sympathy, and without this of what use are therest? For what men see and hear in any matter are the things they are in sympathy with. If your heart is out of tune, there is never any echo of the melody that is about you.
To this chapter on optimism and pessimism I would add a small postscript. I would fain have made it a chapter or many chapters, but I have not the room. It is the strong connection between religion and optimism as evinced in a high birth rate, between irreligion and pessimism as shown in a falling off in the population. For that is the great complaint in France to-day. It is noticeable especially amongst the cultured classes, who are absolutely irreligious, and who are absolutely pessimistic: the birth rate is falling so rapidly that France ceases to increase. Only in Normandy, where religion yet retains power, does the birth rate keep up. This is not a solitary instance. All history repeats it. Do you remember Matthew Arnold's lines: