Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/876

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

Maryland Prisoners' Aid Association. The scope, methods, and results of the work of the Maryland Prisoners' Aid Association are briefly outlined in a pamphlet issued by the association (Baltimore, 1897). Its object, according to the constitution, is " to promote the temporal and spiritual welfare of those who are in prisons or lately discharged therefrom," but the association has gone farther in securing meas- ures for the prevention of crime. Since its organization in 1869 there has been secured, largely through the efforts of the association, the separation of the sexes in jails and almshouses and the removal of children from them; the act giving judges discretion to suspend sentence in certain cases ; the act against female sitters in con- cert saloons ; the act prescribing the sale of cigarettes to minors ; the abolishment of " the magistrate fee system, with its pernicious features, and great burden on the taxpayers by overcrowding the jails, through commitments on trivial charges, in order to secure the fee for every arrest made."

The Essential Nature of Religion. "Religion is a substitute in the rational world for instinct in the subrational world " Much has been superadded to the origi- nal nucleus, and belongs to it in the sense of having been produced by it.

Along with the individual mind which worked egotistically for the individual's end worked, subconsciously, what may be properly called a collective or social mind, warning against danger and authoritatively inhibiting all race-destroying actions. " A new device, analogous in many respects to instinct on the lower plane, was [thus] gradually developed and perfected pari passu with the reason on the higher plane. This device was religion."

" After the appearance of reason upon the scene, passion not certainly having diminished, but having continued to increase, the new power of gratifying passion only served to multiply the dangers that beset the triumphant legatees of this rich heritage. The very method by which intellect works, far too rapid to give time for the develop- ment of instincts, precluded for all future time the employment of this safeguard. A new safeguard must be found commensurate with the forces to be held in check, otherwise the fate of the majority of its predecessors must await the dominant race. Religion, in the primitive and fundamental sense'in which the term is here employed, was such a safeguard."

The religious sentiment must be distinguished from its product. The sense of race safety is its very kernel. The conception of religion produced the appropriate institution. "Religion as an institution is a different thing from religion as an idea. The institution arose, like all other human institutions, as a product of the social forces brought into equilibrium for the storage and economical expenditure of social energy."

"In the great dualism of life, religion is the champion of function against feeling, of the race against the individual. It is race reason working for function against individual reason working for feeling. It represents the primordial conservatism of mankind." It represents the race and the future ; it denies the claims of feeling and demands sacrifice. " It deals with function, not feeling, and simply serves Dame Nature in her great cosmic scheme of preserving, perpetuating, and increasing life. If to these be added the perfectionment of living beings, this is only because such perfectionment is a means to the supreme end. It has no reference to the deepening or heightening of the quality of sentiment. Anything in existing religions that seems to contradict this statement is something superadded to religion itself some late graft upon the original stock and belongs to a modern period."

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