A Study of Religion (Set of 2 Volumes)

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The characteristic to which exception has been chiefly taken, and which marks the book off from most modern expositions of the 'Science of Religion', is that, instead of being content to clear away the accidents and fix the essence of Religion as a human phenomenon and apprehend the correlate Reality which its means. In doing so, it disappoints the promise of its own title: the reader goes to it in order to 'study' the whole group of phenomena that come under the head of 'Religion', and sort them into their species and genera as objects of natural history; and he is brought up short by the irrelevant distinction of true and false; which shuts him out from expatiating among by far the greater and livelier part of the field of observation, the world's grotesque train of gods and goddesses, and is allowed to see only the contents of the author's own sacrarium. This misunder- standing of the promised scope of the 'Study' is consummated in a definition of 'Religion' in which the author avowedly identity it with 'Ethical Theism' and so excuse himself from recognizing the numerous other varieties of human faith and worship. It is impossible that the student of historical and psychological theology, as now understood, can be satisfied with a definition which makes no provision for his sciences, but expels all their phenomena from the category of religion, except such as may be verifiable as also hyper phenomenal. The effect of this treatment is, to deprive the book of theological apologetics, i.e. not a progressive establishment of facts and laws, but an advocacy of given thesis by the usual polemical methods of excluding contradictories and discrediting alternatives.

I cannot better introduce my readers to the main purport of these volumes, than by relating a conversational criticism: by an eminent English Positivist, on a no less eminent American representative of the Spencerian system of thought. Friendly relations had grown up between them, when Professor Fiske, of Harvard, was in this country;- relations, none the less cordial from the tacit assumption, supposed to be warranted by his 'Cosmic Philosophy, of their common rejection of religious beliefs. On the appearance, in 1884, of his interesting Address to the concord School of Philosophy, entitled "The Destiny of Man in the light of his Origin,' a report of its argument, contained in a private letter, was read to his English friend; who listened attentively enough till it came out that the professor found, in the psychical evolution on Man, an intimation of individual immortality; but then broke in with the exclamation.-'What? John Fiske say that? Well; it only proves, what I have always maintained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to metaphysics, without ending in a theology!'-A position, in which the speaker has no doubt been confirmed by the author's second Concord Address, in 1885, on 'the Idea of God'.

The word 'Religion' is here use in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago; and a reader whose conceptions are cast in the moulds of that time will know what to expect from an enquiry into its 'Sources and Contents.' Understanding by 'Religion' belief in an Ever- ling God, that is, a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe ad holding Moral relations with mankind, he will hope, on the one hand, to be led to the innermost seat of this belief in the constitution of human nature; and, on the other, to see development from it the dependent varieties of thought implicit in so fruitful a germ, and the cognate truths attached to it by collateral relations, Along just these paths of reflective insight, viz. first, to the secret birth-points of conscious religion, and then, to the survey of its interior volume and applied lights, it is the purpose of this 'Study' to conduct him, so far as mere critical scrutiny can avail in a matter not wholly intellectual In the soul of Religion, the apprehension of truth and the enthusiasm of devotion inseparably blend: and in proportion as either is deserted by the other, the conditions of right judgment fail.