"religion," then, generally I mean a scheme of the world with some theory of how man got into it and the influences, mostly supernatural, which affect him here. It usually, though not always, includes some code of morality for use here and some account of what happens after death.
This is, I think, more or less the accepted meaning.
And there are the words Spirit and Soul.
I note that in considering origins of religion the great first difficulty has been how the savage evolved the idea of "God" or "Spirit" as opposed to man. Various theories have been proposed, such as that it evolved from reasoning on dreams. To me the question is whether such an idea exists at all. It may be possible that men trained in abstract thought without reference to fact, the successors of many generations of men equally so trained, do consider themselves to have such a conception. I have met men who declared they had a clear idea of the fourth dimension in Mathematics and of unending space. There may be people who can realise a Spirit which has other qualities than man. In some creeds the idea is assumed as existing. But personally I have never found it among those who make religion as distinguished from those who theorise upon it. The gods of the simpler religious people I have met, whether East or West, have been frankly only enlarged men, with the appetites and appearances and the powers of men. They differ from men only in degree, never in kind. They require food and offerings, they have passions, sometimes they have wives. The early gods are but men. If they are invisible, so can man be; if they are powerful, so are kings. It is only a question of degree, never of kind. I do not find that the God that the Boers appeal to so passionately has any different qualities in their thoughts from a marvellous man. Truly they will say, "No, God is a Spirit." Then if you reply, "So be it; tell me how a Spirit differs from a man, what qualities a Spirit has that are inconceivable in man," they cannot go on; and the qualities they appeal to in their God are always very human qualities – partiality, forgiveness, help, and the like.
Many men will say they believe things which they do not understand. I enter into the subject so fully later I do not want to write more now. I only wish to define that the word God, as I use it, in no wise means more than "the Personality who causes things."
And again about soul. What is soul? The theologian gets up and answers at once that soul exists independent of the body. So be it. Then who has the conception? And what is it like when you have got it? Have Christians it? Then why can they not understand resurrection of the soul without also the resurrection of the body? They cannot. Look at the facts. It is such a fact it has actually forced itself into the creeds. Angels have bodies and also wings. Ghosts have bodies and also clothes. They are recognisable. I know a ghost who likes pork for supper. They sometimes have horses and all sorts of additions. The body may be filmy, but it is a body. Gas is filmy and quite as transparent as a ghost.
Perhaps the people who have put the transmigration of souls as one of their religious tenets really have the conception of a soul apart from any body. I doubt it even here. But this also will come later.
Meanwhile, when I use the word "soul" or "spirit," I do not infer that it is separable from the body or inseparable. I mean simply the essence of that which is man; the identity, the ego existing in man as he is. I think, indeed, this is the correct meaning. We say that a city has fifty thousand souls. Have they no bodies? When I wrote "The Soul of a People" I certainly did not omit their bodies or ignore them. On the contrary. And no one supposed I did. I do not either mean to postulate the inseparability of body and soul. Soul means essence.
Finally, there is the word reason. What is that? By reason I mean the faculty of arranging and grouping facts. It is the power of perspective which sees facts in their proper relation to other facts. The facts themselves are supplied as regards the outer world by the senses of sight and hearing and taste, of touch and sympathy; and as regards the inner world of sensations, such as hate, and love, and fear by the ability to feel those sensations.
Reason itself cannot supply facts. It can but arrange them. By placing a series of facts in due order the existence of other facts may be suspected, as the existence of Neptune was deduced from certain known aberrations. The observation of Neptune by the telescope followed.
In other words, reason may be called "the science of facts."
I offer no apology for this introduction. Most of the confusion of thought, most of the mistiness of argument, is due to the fact that people habitually use words without any clear idea of their meaning. A reviewer of "The Soul of a People" declared that Buddhism was a philosophy, not a religion. I asked him to give me a list of what he accepted as religions, and then to furnish a definition of religion that would include all these and exclude Buddhism. I am still waiting. No doubt he had never tried to really define what he meant by his words. Instead of using words as counters of a fixed value he threw them about as blank cheques, meaning anything or nothing.
When you find confusion of argument in a book, want of clearness of expression, when you see men arguing and misunderstanding each other, there is nearly always one reason. Either they are using words in different senses or they have no clear idea themselves of what they mean by their words. Ask ten men what they mean when they say, Art, beauty, civilisation, right, wrong, or any other abstract term, and see if one can give a satisfactory explanation.
This is an error I am trying to avoid.
CHAPTER I
OF WHAT USE IS RELIGION?
Of what use is religion?
All nations, almost all men, have a religion. From the savage in the woods who has his traditions of how the world began, who has his ghosts and his devils to fear or to worship, to the Christian and the Buddhist with their religion full of beautiful conceptions and ideas – all people have a religion.
And the religion of men is determined for them by their birth. They are born into it, as they are into their complexions, their habits, their language. The Continental and Irish Celt is a Roman Catholic, the Teuton is a follower of Luther, the Slav a member of the Greek Church. The Anglo-Saxon, who is a compromise of races, has a creed which is a compromise also, and the Celt of England has his peculiar form of dissent, more akin perhaps in some ways to Romanism than to Lutheranism. A Jew is and has been a Jew, a Hindu is a Hindu, Arabs and Turks are Mahommedans.
It is so with all races of men. A man's religion to-day is that into which he is born, and those of the higher and older races who change are few, so very few they but serve strongly to emphasize the rule.
There have been, it is true, periods when this has not been so. There have been times of change, of conversions, of rapid religious evolution when the greater faiths have gathered their harvests of men, when beliefs have spread as a flood threatening to engulf a world. No one has ever done so. Each has found its own boundary and stayed there. Their spring tide once passed they have ceased to spread. They have become, indeed, many of them, but tideless oceans, dead seas of habit ceasing even to beat upon their shores. Many of them no longer even try to proselytise, having found their inability to stretch beyond their boundaries; others still labour, but their gains are few – how few only those who have watched can know.
Some savages are drawn away here or there, but that is all. The greater faiths and forms of faith, Catholicism, Lutheranism, the Greek Church, Mahommedanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many others, remain as they were. Their believers are neither converted nor convert. Men born into them remain as they were born. They do not change, they are satisfied with what they have.
They are more than satisfied; they are often, almost always, passionately attached to their faith.
There is nothing men value more than their religion. There is nothing so unbearable to them as an attack upon it. No one will allow it. Even the savage clings to his fetish in the mountain top and will not permit of insult to it. Men
