1907

48TOR, LENOX ANE TILDEN FOUNDATION

THE PREREQUISITES OF A RELIGION *..

BY FELIX ADLER.

What is the way to get a religion? Let us begin by setting explicitly before our minds what, for most of us at least, cannot be the way. The way cannot be to prostrate our intellects at the foot of the throne of authority; to bind that Samson, the human mind, and give him over into the hands of the Philistines; to abjure our reason, to perpetrate an act of self-mutilation in that noble part which distinguishes us from the brutes. We cannot, as some eminent persons in the ninteenth century have done, cross over the bridge of scepticism back into the stronghold of orthodoxy. Whatever religion we adopt, must be consistent with the truths with which we have been endowed at the hands of science. It may be ultra-scientific-indeed, it must be, must pass beyond the teachings of science; but it may not be anti-scientific. Whatever religious convictions we adopt, must be in accord with what is roughly called the modern view of life. When we ask for a religion, we ask for one that shall be consistent with the new view of the Bible and its human origin, with the new view of the creeds and of their human origin; one that shall be consistent with the conception of an unchangeable order of nature, not subject to miraculous interference; one that shall be consistent, too, with the new aspirations of our age and responsive to the new social need. We dare not give up one iota of what the human intellect has won

* An address given before the Society for Ethical Culture of New York.

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in order to purchase, by a craven compromise with the past, the peace of the lotus-eater.

But, on the other hand, we need to be equally warned against expecting too much from the intellect, against the supposition that merely by the use of the reason we can get a religion. That, also, is not the way. One cannot get a religion merely by trying to think out the problems of the universe. That is the mistake of many, especially of young men when they begin to be troubled about the problems of life. They suppose that by mere thinking and reading they can obtain a solution. You may study all the idealistic systems of philosophy from Plato down, following the subtle, daring and often brilliant arguments by which these thinkers attempted to prove the existence of the divine in the universe; and, after reading all their books and mastering all their arguments, you may yet be not a whit nearer to religion. In the same manner, you might go through all the textbooks of science-that science which I have just said we may not contradict-with a view of finding in the scroll of nature the marks of design, the revelations of the divine; and, at the end of your search, you might yet be no nearer to religion than you were at the outset. It is a mistake to approach the subject of religion from the point of view of the intellect.

All really religious persons will tell you that religion is, primarily, a matter of experience. You must get a certain kind of experience, and the philosophic thinking will be of the utmost use to you, namely, in explicating what is implied in that experience. But you must get the experience first. Imagine a person who has never seen the sunlight out of doors, who has been shut up all his life in a room barely illuminated by the feeble flame of a lamp, and who has been instructed by some professor in the undulatory theory of light; who

has been taught, with the help of diagrams, the laws of light-the laws of reflection according to which light is thrown back from the myriad objects of nature, the laws of refraction by which the strong shaft of light is broken into the beauty of the prismatic colors. Do you suppose that such a person could have any adequate conception of light? He might talk wisely about itmore so than you or I perhaps with the help of his diagrams and his formulas. But, not having seen the light, not having rejoiced in the effulgence of it, he would not know, as we know, what light is. And so a person wha has never tasted water might obtain from a chemist a certain intellectual understanding of it, might know what the elements are that enter into it, and in what proportions. But he would not know what water is; as the traveler knows who has journeyed far, and parched with thirst finds the cool spring, and kneels at its brim, and drinks and is satisfied. You cannot know what light is unless you see it, nor water unless you taste it; you must have experience of them to know them.

So, too, you must have experience of religion in order to know it. But this experience is not at all a mystical thing. It is not reserved for the initiated and the elect. It is possible to everyone who chooses to have it. And of it I now wish to speak: not of any particular religious system, but of the material of which all religious systems must be built, of the inner thing that must antedate and prepare the way for any genuine religion whatsoever. The point I have in mind may also be made plain by the distinction between fact and theory. There are facts which we hit upon, which we stumble upon, which we somehow get hold of as facts, before ever we can trace them back to their causes, or deduce from them their inferences. So there are certain facts of the inner life

which we must get hold of, before ever we can successfully go back to their metaphysical or doctrinal presuppositions, or deduce from them their corollaries. The conditio sine qua non of religion, the indispensable prerequisite of it, is to get possession of these facts. Let us now consider what they are.

The main fact of all is that Spirit exists. I use this word in default of a better. I do not mean that ghosts exist, nor yet one universal ghost-a world-ghost. I understand by "spirit" that which is not material, and in so far is unlike the chair, or the house, or the stone. The first and main fact to get hold of is that something non-material really exists. All great scientific thinkers have long since given up the materialistic hypothesis of the universe. It lingers only among the semi-educated. Among scientists no thinker of commanding position to-day stands for the materialistic philosophy. But it is one thing to declare, as a purely intellectual judgment, that materialism is not well founded, and another thing to find in one's own experience the fact that there is spirit. Some go so far as to say that there is spirit in everything; that in the crystal there is, as it were, a spirit petrified, in the flower a spirit dreaming, in the animal a spirit just starting into waking consciousness. That may be so, and it may not. How can we tell? We do not know the crystal, or the flower, or the animal from within. There is only one object in nature which we know on its inner side, and that is the thing which we call Self. The first and main fact to lay hold of is, that something non-material exists in ourselves. How shall we ascertain this? By experience. And by what sort of experience? By a kind of experience that is possible to the simplest and humblest. This always is the mark of religion, that it does not address itself merely to the highly gifted, the highly