"On that hard Pagan world disgust and secret loathing fell,Deep weariness, and sated lust made human life a hell.In his cool hall with haggard eyes the Roman noble lay;He drove abroad in furious guise along the Appian way.* * * * *No easier nor no quicker passed the impracticable hours."
"On that hard Pagan world disgust and secret loathing fell,Deep weariness, and sated lust made human life a hell.In his cool hall with haggard eyes the Roman noble lay;He drove abroad in furious guise along the Appian way.* * * * *No easier nor no quicker passed the impracticable hours."
The Roman Empire fell because there were nomore Romans left. They had died out and left no children to succeed them. Where is the highest birth rate to-day in Europe? It is in "priest-ridden" Russia, where the people are without doubt more deeply imbued with their faith than any other people of the West now. In Burma, where religion has such a hold on the people as the world has never known, the birth rate is very high indeed. The Turks in the heyday of their religious enthusiasm increased very rapidly, but now and for long they seem to be stationary, and in the Boers we see again a high birth rate and very strong religious convictions. Our birth rate, on the contrary, is falling with the growing irreligion in certain classes. Not that I wish for a moment to infer that religious feeling causes more children to be born. I have no belief whatever in the usual theories that the fall in birth rates is due to preventive measures, which religion disallows, or to debauchery, which religion controls. The supporters of such a theory admit that they cannot prove it. And there is very much against such an idea. When religion in the early ages of Christianity discouraged marriage and did all in its power to encourage celibacy, it never succeeded in the end. Men and women might go into convents for certain reasons—not, I think, mainly religious—the birth of childrenfrom those outside did not alter. And during the priestly rule in Paraguay population disappeared so rapidly the monks were alarmed, and took stringent and strange methods to stop the decay, but in vain—the people had lost heart.
Why are the Maories and many other people disappearing? From disease? That is not a reason. It is a fact that with a virile people a plague or famine is followed by an increase in the birth rate. This is proved in India. The Maories, too, have lost heart. They may have acquired Christianity, but that is no help. No; the adoption of a religion does not affect the question.
But still they go together, and the answer seems to be here: A nation that is virile, that is full of vitality, finds an outlet for that vitality in children, an expression of it in religion. A virile people is optimistic always. Pessimism, whether in nations or individuals, comes from a deficiency of nerve strength. But why peoples lose their vitality no one yet knows. There is a tribe on the Shan frontier of Burma that twenty years ago was a people of active hunters, always gun or bow in hand, scouring the forests for game, fearing nothing. And now they have lost their energy. Their nerve is gone. They are listless and depressed. For a gun they substitute a hoe anddo a little feeble gardening. Their children are few, and shortly the tribe will be dead.
No one knows why.
Religion, deep and true, and strong faith is possible only to strong natures; it is the outcome of strong feeling. It is a companion always to that virility that is optimism, that does not fear the future; it knows not what may come, but faces the future with confidence. It takes each day as it comes. Such are the nations that replenish the earth. The world is the heritage of the godly. The Old Testament is full of that truth, and it is no less true now than then. But one does not proceed from the other. They both come from that fount whence springs the life of the world.
Reason and religion have but little in common. They come from different sources, they pursue different ways. They are never related in this order as cause and effect. No one was ever reasoned into a religion, no one was ever reasoned out of his religion. Faith exists or does not exist in man without any reference to his reason. Reason may follow faith, does follow faith; never does faith follow reason.
Is it indeed always so? Then how about the boy told of in the earlier chapters? He was born into a religion, he was educated in it, and he rejected it. Why? He himself tells why he did so, because his reason drove him away from it. His reason, looking at the world as he found it, could not accept the way of life inculcated by his faith. He found it impossible, unworkable, and therefore not beautiful. His reason told him it was impracticable, not inaccordance with facts, and therefore he would have none of it.
His reason, too, following Darwin, told him that the earlier part of the Old Testament could not be correct. Man has risen, not fallen; he had his origin not six thousand years ago, but perhaps sixty thousand, perhaps much more. In many ways his reason fought with his religion, and it prevailed. Was no one ever reasoned out of a faith? Surely this boy was, surely many boys and men equally with him have so been deprived by reason of their faiths. Reason is the enemy of faith. Is not this so?
When that boy was fighting his battle long ago I am sure he thought so. Certainly he said so to himself. Was he insincere or mistaken? Surely he should know best of what was going on in his mind. He tells how reason drove him from his faith. Was he not right?
I think that he had not then learned to look at the roots of things. If there is one truth which grows upon us in life as we go on, as we watch men and what they say and do, as we watch ourselves and what we say or do, it is this, that men do not do things nor feel things because they think them, but the reverse. Men think things because they want to do them; their reason follows their instincts. No man seeks todisprove what he likes and feels to be good, no man seeks to prove what he instinctively dislikes and rejects. You cannot argue yourself into a liking or a distaste. If, then, you find a man seeking reasons to disprove his faith, it is because his faith irks him, because he would fain shake it off and be done with it. If he were happy in it and it suited him, reasons disproving any part of it would pass by him harmlessly. You cannot shake a man's conviction of what hefeelsto be useful and beautiful.
To the man, therefore, looking back it seems that all the boy's thoughts, his arguments, his reasoning, arise from this, that his religion did not suit. It galled him somewhere, perhaps in many places; it was a burden, and instead of being beautiful it was the reverse. So to rid himself of what he could not abide he sought refuge in his reason. And his reason going, as reason has always done, to the theories of faith instead of to the facts, he found that the creeds and beliefs had no foundation in fact, were but formulæ thrown upon an ignorant world, and should be rejected. So he left them. But it was never his reason that made him do so; reason came in but as the judge, openly justifying what had happened silently and unnoticed in his heart.
What was it, then, that drove the boy from his faith? What were his instincts that remained unfulfilled, roused against his religion till they drove him to find reasons for leaving it? What was it that galled him till he revolted? There were, I think, mainly two things—the rise of an intense revolt to the continual exercise of authority, and the greater effect of the code of Christ upon him.
When a boy is frequently ill, when his constitution is delicate and easily upset, it is necessary that he should be very careful what he does, how he exposes himself to damp or cold, how he over-exerts himself at work or play. But for a boy to exercise this care is very difficult. He feels fairly well, and the other boys are going skating or boating, why should he not do so? The day is not very cold, and the other boys do not wear comforters; they laugh at him if he does so. He will not admit that he cannot do what other boys can do. So he has to be looked after and guarded, and cared for and watched, and made to do things he dislikes. If, too, the supervision becomes unnecessarily close, if there is a tendency to interfere not only where he is wrong and wants correction, but in many details where it is not required, is it not natural? If in time it socomes, or the boy thinks it so comes, that he cannot move hand or foot, cannot go in or out, cannot think or read, or even rest, without perpetual correction, is it so very unnatural? Mistake? Who shall say where the mistake lay? Who shall say if there was any mistake at all, unless great affection be a mistake? Maybe it was the inevitable result of circumstances. But still there it was. And though a small boy may accept such rule without question, yet as he grows up it irks him more and more, until at last it may become a daily and hourly irritation growing steadily more unbearable, more exasperating, month by month.
There is, too, in many people—women, I think, mostly, and with women chiefly in reverse proportion to their knowledge—a tendency to give advice. Few are without the desire, maybe a kindly desire in its inception, to advise others. The world at large does not take to it kindly, so the advice has to be bottled up, to be expended in its fulness where it can. This boy got it all. He received advice from innumerable people, enough to have furnished a universe. Most of it he felt to be worthless, almost all of it he was sure was impertinence. Yet he could not resent it, because he was under authority.
And now perhaps you may see how there grew up slowly in him an utter loathing of authority, a hatred to being checked and supervised, and advised and lectured for ever. Sometimes he would revolt and say, "Can't you leave me alone?" and this was insubordination. He would have given all he could, everything, for liberty. "I would sooner," he said to himself, "catch cold and die than be worried daily not to forget my comforter. I would sooner grow up a fool and earn my living by breaking stones in the road than be supervised into my lessons like this, that I may be learned. But when I am grown up it must cease. It SHALL cease. Then I shall be free to go my own way, and do wrong and suffer for it."
And now imagine a boy in a state of mind like this told that he wouldneverbe free. A boy's authorities might pass, school and home might be left behind, but God would remain. Masters can be avoided and deceived, God cannot be deceived. His eye is always on you. He sees everything you do. His hand is always guiding and directing and checking you. It seems to him that the exasperation was never to end, was to last even into the next life, if this be true. Then you may understand how his instincts drove his reason to findgood and sufficient cause for rejecting this God and for seeking freedom. "Give me freedom," he cried, "freedom even to do wrong and suffer for it. I will not complain. Only let me alone. Do not interfere. I will not have a God who interferes." His reason helped him and showed him the emptiness of the creeds, and he went on his way without.
Then there was the Sermon on the Mount. To most boys this does not appeal at all. They hear it read. It is to them part of "religion"—that is, for consumption on Sunday. It is not of any consequence, only words. They do not think twice of it. But with this boy it was different. The Sermon on the Mount did appeal to him. He thought it very beautiful as a little boy. It seemed worth remembering. He did remember it. It seemed worth acting up to as much as possible.
But as he grew older and learned life as it is, he became able to see that it was not applicable at all to life, that life was much rougher and harder than he supposed, and required very different rules. He slowly grew disillusioned. And with the disillusion came bitterness. If you have never believed in any certain thing, never taken it to yourself, you can go on theoretically admiring it, and, if that becomes impossible,you can eventually let it go without trouble. But if you have believed, if you have strongly believed and desired to accept, when you find that your belief and acceptance have been misplaced, there comes a revulsion. If it cannot be all, it must be none. Love turns to hate, never to indifference. Belief changes to absolute rejection, never to toleration.
This code of Christ could not be absolutely followed in daily life, therefore it was absolutely untrue. And being untrue he could not bear to hear it preached every Sunday as a teaching from on High. He shrank from it unconsciously as from a theory he had loved and which had deceived him: the love remained, the confidence was gone. He was betrayed. But he never reasoned about it till he had rejected it. Then he sought to justify by reason what he had already accomplished in fact.
So do men think things, because they have done or wish to do them; never the reverse.
It seems trivial after the above to recall a minor point wherein instinct has had much to say.
I can remember as a boy how I disliked to hear the church bells ringing for service. I hated them. They made me shudder. AndI used to think to myself that I must be naturally wicked and irreligious to be so affected. "They ring for God's service and you shudder. You must be indeed the wicked boy they say." So I thought many a time.
And now I know that I disliked the bells then, as I dislike them now, because of all sounds that of bells is to me the harshest and noisiest. I dislike not only church bells, but all bells. I have no prejudice against dinner, yet I would willingly wait in some houses half an hour, or even have it half-cold if it could be announced without a bell. And church bells! Very few are in tune, none are sweet toned, all are rung far louder and faster than they should be, so that their notes, which might be bearable, become a wrangling abomination.
But I love the monastery gongs in Burma because they are delicately tuned, and they are rung softly and with such proper intervals between each note that there is no jar, none of that hideous conflict of the dying vibrations with the new note that is maddening to the brain.
It is trivial, maybe, but it is real. And out of such trivialities is life made. Out of such are our recollections built. I shall never remember the call to Christian prayer without a shudder of dislike, a putting of my fingers inmy ears. I shall never recall the Buddhist gongs ringing down the evening air across the misty river without there rising within me some of that beauty, that gentleness and harmony, to which they seem such a perfect echo.
What, then, is religion? Do any of the definitions given at the beginning explain what it really is? Is it a theory of the universe, is it morality, is it future rewards and punishments? It may be all or none of these things. Is it creeds, dogmas, speculations, or theories of any kind? It is none of these things.
Religion is the recognition and cultivation of our highest emotions, of our more beautiful instincts, of all that we know is best in us.
What these emotions may be varies in each people according to their natures, their circumstances, their stage of civilisation. In the Latins some emotions predominate, in the Teutons others, in the Hindus yet others. Each race of men has its own garden wherein grow flowers that are not found elsewhere, and of these they make their faiths.
Some of these emotions I have tried to show in this book. For the Latins they are the emotions of fatherhood, of prayer, and confession, of sacrifice and atonement, of motherhood, of art and beauty, of obedience, of rule, of mercy, of forgiveness, of the resurrection of the body, of prayer for the dead, of strong self-denial and asceticism, of many others; but those, I think, are the chief.
For the Protestant, the more rigid Protestant, it is the cultivation of the emotions of force, grandeur, prayer, justice, conduct, punishment of evil, austerity, and also many others.
With the Burman Buddhist it is the recognition and cultivation of the beauties of freedom, peace, calm, rigid self-denial, charity in thought and deed to all the world, pity to animals, the existence of the soul before and after death, with no reference to any particular body. The Mahommedan has for one of his principal emotions courage in battle, and the Hindu cleanliness of body and purity of race.
These things are religions. Out of his strongest feelings has man built up his faiths.
And the creeds are but the theories of the keener intellects of the race to explain, and codify, and organise the cultivation of these feelings.
Creeds are not religions, nor are religions proved by miracle or by prophecy, by evidence, or any reasoning of any kind. The instincts are innate or do not exist at all. Like all emotions and feelings, they cannot be created or destroyed by reason.
Why does a man fall in love? No one knows. And if he fall in love, can you cure him of it by argument? Would it be any use to say to him? "The girl you love is not beautiful, is not clever; she would be of no use to you, she does not return your love at all. You cannot really love her." He would only laugh and say, "All that may be true, and yet the fact remains unaltered. She is the woman I love. My reason may prevent my marrying her, it cannot prevent my love. And you may be right that this other woman has all the virtues, but I have no love for her." So it is with all the emotions. You either have them or have not. You do not reason about them. Reason is of things we doubt, not of things we know. Therefore are the beliefs of one religion incomprehensible to the believers in another. Nothing is so difficult to understand as an emotion you have not felt. What is perfect beauty to one man is stark ugliness to another. So it is with religion. To understand well the faith you musthave in you all the chords that these faiths draw music from, and how many have that?
Religion is of the heart, not of the reason. Theologians of all creeds warn the believer against reason as a snare of the devil. A freethinker must be an Atheist. History is one long conflict between religion and science. But why is this, if they have no concern one with another? Why fight, why not exist together?
Because all men, freethinkers as well as theologians, have failed to see what religion really consists in. They think it is in the theories of creation, of God, of salvation, of heaven and hell. They look one and all to the creeds and dogmas as religion.
And none of these creeds and dogmas will, as a whole, stand criticism. They fall before the thinker into irretrievable ruin, and therefore the freethinker imagines he has destroyed religion. But religion lives on, and he wonders why. He puts it down to the blindness of men. The theologian rejoices because the continued life of religion seems to him the vindication of the creeds. Yet are they both wrong. Men are not fools, nor does religion live by the truth of its creeds. The whole initial idea has been mistaken. The creeds are but theories to explain religion. Scientific men have invented the etherand theories connected with it to explain heat and light and electricity. These theories are good now, and are universally accepted, but they are not proved. Supposing a hundred years hence wider perception and new facts should throw great doubts on whether ether exists at all as supposed, or on the present theories of heat and electricity? Suppose, too, that the old school scientists are stubborn and refuse to meet these new thoughts? What will the sensible man do? Will he say, "This theory of ether waves is untenable, exploded, foolish, and therefore I will believe it no longer; and as the theory is wrong, so too the phenomena of the theory are all imaginations. There are no such things as heat and light, and I will not warm myself in the sun." Would that be sense? I think reason would reply, "I am sorry the old theories are gone. They were true while they lasted. But now they are dead, and we have not found new ones. Yet if the theory be dead, the facts are still there. The sun still shines, and we have heat and light. These things are true. No man shall frighten me and say, 'If you will not believe our science you shall not warm yourself at our sun. You shall not light your fire or your lamp unless you admit ether waves.'Perhaps a new theory may arise. But anyhow I have the sun yet, and my lamp is not broken. They are facts still."
That is exactly the present position as regards many faiths. The creeds are theories to explain facts. The theories are very old and we have grown out of them. The theologians will not surrender them, clinging to them in the imagination that they really are religion, and that without them religion will fall, conjuring with words to try and support them.
What should reason say in the face of this? "I do not believe in your theories of God and the future state, and the resurrection of the body, and so on, and therefore I won't have anything to do with any religion." Would that be reason? Yes, if you believe the creeds are religion; no, if you believe that religion lies far deeper than creeds. Or to use another simile: the creeds are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow. But if not? If grammarians are hide-bound, are we to refuse to talk? In this latter case, if the reason weremine, I think reason would say, "Bother these theologians, their dogmas and creeds, their theories and grammars, what do they matter? The instinct of prayer remains, of confession, of sacrifice. They appeal to me still. They fill my heart with beauty. Shall I refuse to accept the glories of life, shall I refuse to cultivate my soul because some people who claim authority have theories about these things with which I don't agree? Not all the creeds nor theologians in the world shall prevent my making the best of myself. The garden of the soul is no close preserve of theirs.
"Religion is the satisfaction of some of the wants of the souls of men. It is a cult of some of the emotions, never of all. For the emotions are so varied, so contradictory, that all cannot live together. I do not quite know why one people includes one emotion in religion and another rejects it out of religion, while still maintaining its beauty and truth. But no religion includes more than one side of life. There are others. I, too, will cultivate these emotions which I need. But this I will not forget, that life has many sides. Life has many emotions, and all are good, though all may not come into religion. There is ambition, there is love of gaiety, of humour, of laughter, there is courageand pride, the glory of success. To live life whole none must be neglected. They are planted in our hearts for some good purpose. I will not weed them out. My garden shall grow all the flowers it can, and reason shall be the gardener to see that none grow rank and choke the others.
"Whatever things are beautiful, that make the heart to beat and the eye grow dim, whatever I know to be good, that shall I have. 'For that which toucheth the heart is beautiful to the eye.'"
But granted, people may say, that religion is what you say, a cult of the emotions, of what use is it? Why should these emotions be cultivated at all? You say that they are beautiful because they are true, and that they are true because they are of use. Of what use are they? Some can be explained perhaps, but not most—not the instinct of God, for instance, nor of Law, nor the instinct of prayer. It seems to me that unless you can prove that they are true, essentially true conceptions, they cannot be beautiful. And this you say you cannot prove. "No one can prove God," you say, and prayer, surely that is against reason, and demonstrably a weakness. Certainly not a good emotion to cultivate. "You say it is beautiful. How can you prove that?"
Travelling on the Continent among those placeswhere there are little colonies of English people who for one reason or another have left their own country, there crops up occasionally a man of peculiar kind, hardly ever to be met elsewhere. He is a man who has left England, we will suppose, for economy's sake, who has settled abroad, perhaps in one place, perhaps roaming from place to place, who has no work, no interest in life. He has drifted away from the current of our national life, he has entered no other, but he exists, he would say, as a student of man and a philosopher on motives.
One such, meeting me one day, turned his conversation upon wars and upon patriotism. The former horrified him, the latter revolted him. "Patriotism," he said, "can you defend such a feeling? Have you any reasoning to support it? Patriotism is a narrowness, a blindness. It is little better than a baseness founded on ignorance. How can it be defended? You say it is beautiful. Prove to me that it is so. I deny it."
To whom, and to men like this, it seems that there is only one answer to be made.
"My friend, the love of your own people and your own country, if it ever existed within you, is long dead or you would never ask such a question. I cannot reason with you on the subject, because it would be like reasoning with a blind man on thebeauty of being able to see. He who sees knows; but if a man be blind, how can it be explained to him? Neither I nor my fellows can talk to you about patriotism, because it is a feeling we have, but of which you are ignorant. It is not a question of reason. But if you would know whether patriotism be beautiful or the ignorant foolishness you suppose, I can show you the road to learn.
"Go back to that England you have forgotten, and in your forgetfulness begun to despise. Go back there on the eve of a great victory, or a great deliverance, such a day as that on which Ladysmith was relieved. And go not into the streets if the loud rejoicings hurt your philosophic ear, but go into the homes of the people. Go to the rich, to the middle class, to the artisan, to the labourer, and mark their glowing faces, their glad eyes, the look of glory, of thanksgiving that our people have been rescued, that our flag has escaped a disaster. Look at the faces of these men and women and children, whose hearts are full at the news. And then ask them, 'Is patriotism a mean and debasing passion?' They know. Or do better even than this, go yourself to Africa, to India, to the thousand league frontiers where men die daily for their flag, for their own honour, and that of their country. Takerifle yourself and beat back those who would destroy our peace, take up your pen and give some of your life to the people whom we rule. You will find it a better life, perhaps, than at a foreign spa. Give yourself freely for your country and those your country gives in charge to you. I think you will learn, maybe, what patriotism means. But argument, reason? I think you exaggerate the power of reason. It can argue only from facts. It is necessary to know the facts first. And you are ignorant of your facts, because you have never felt them. Only those who feel them know. Go and give your life, and before it be gone you will have learnt what neither I nor any man who ever lived cantellyou. You will have learnt therealitiesof life.
"For you and those like you mistake the power of reason, you have forgotten its limitations. Reason is but the power of arranging facts, it cannot provide them. Your eyes will give you the facts they can see, your ears what they can hear, your sympathies will give you the realities of men's lives. If you have no emotions, no sympathies, how can you get on? You are like mariners afloat upon the sea vainly waggling your rudders and boasting that you are at the mercy of no erratic winds, while the ships pass you under full sail. Where will reason alonetake you? It cannot take you anywhere. A rudder is only useful to a ship that has motive power. What motive power have you? So you float and work your rudders and turn round and round, and are very bitter. Why are all philosophers so bitter, so hard to bear with, so useless? Because you are conscious unconsciously of your futility, that the world passes you by and laughs.
"The functions of reason are very narrow. You forget them. You exalt reason into the whole of life, committing the mistake for which you rail on others. Unbridled emotion is, as you say, terrible. So is unbridled reason. Where has reason alone ever led anyone save into the dreariest, driest pessimism? Was a philosopher ever a happy man? Even your Utopias, from Plato's to Bellamy's, who would desire them? Hell would be a pleasant relaxation after any of them. The functions of the senses, of which sympathy is the greatest, are to give you facts, the function of reason is to arrange them. The emotions drive man forward, reason directs and controls them. That is all.
"You say religions are founded on errors, on what are your reasonings founded? They are founded onnothings."
Of what use is patriotism? Is it beautiful or no? Of what use is religion? Is it beautiful or no? Prove to me that it is necessary or beautiful. Show me why it should be so.
Is it not the same answer in each case? It is so easy to point out the evils of exaggeration in each. Anyone can do it. But the mean. Prove to me the use and beauty of the mean.
The answer is always the same. If you have religion in you, such a question would never occur to you, for you would feel its use, you wouldknowits beauty. And if you have not, who shall prove it to you? Who shall provide you with the facts on which to reason, who shall open your eyes? But if anyone doubts that religion is useful and is beautiful to its believers, go and watch them.
It matters not where you go, East or West, it is always the same. In England, or France, or Russia, among the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Parsees. It makes no matter if you will but look aright. For you must know how to look and where. You must learn what to read. It is never books I would ask you to read, never creeds, never theologies, never reasons, nor arguments. You will not find what you search in libraries nor yet in places of worship, inceremonies, in temples, great and beautiful as they may be. Not in even their inmost recesses is the secret hid, the secret of all religions. I would have you listen to no preachers, to no theologians. They are the last to know. But I would have you go to the temple of the heart of man and read what is written there, written not in words, but in the inarticulate emotions of the heart. I would have you go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come. Yes, surely, if you be as a man who would learn, who can learn. I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song. Far down below the noises of the warring creeds, the clash of words and forms, the differences of peoples, of climes, of civilisations, of ideals, far down below all this lies that which you would hear. I know not what you would call it. Maybe it is the Voice of God telling us for ever the secret of the world, but in unknown tongue. For me it is like the unceasing surge of a shorelesssea answering to the night, a melody beyond words.
The creeds and faiths are the words that men have set to that melody; they are the interpretations of that wordless song. Each is true to him whom it suits. Every nation has translated it into his own tongue. But never forget that those are only your own interpretations. Whatever your faith may be, you have no monopoly of religion. I confess that to me there is nothing so repellent as the hate of faith for faith. To hear their professors malign and abuse each other, as if each had the monopoly of truth, is terrible. It is as a strife in families where brother is killing brother, and the younger trying to disinherit the elder. I doubt if in all this warfare they can listen for the voice that is for ever telling the secret of the world. Whence came all the faiths but from that inexplicable feeling of the heart, that surge and swell arising we know not whence? If you would malign another's faith remember your own. If you cannot understand his belief stop and consider. Can you understand your own? Do you know whence came these emotions that have risen and made your faith?
The faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery. There are older and younger, stronger and weaker, some babble in strange tonguesmaybe, different from your finer speech. But what of that? Are they the less children of the Great Father for that? Surely if there be the unforgivable offence, the sin against the Holy Ghost, it is this, to deny the truth that lies in all the faiths.
Religion is the music of the infinite echoed from the hearts of men.