Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/728

 It is, in fact, the very condition of progress that, as we advance in knowledge and in culture, we give up something on the road. But it is also a condition that we do not feel the need of that which we have lost. Not only as we become men do we put away childish things, but we can no longer realize in thought the enjoyment which those childish things brought with them. Other interests, new occupations, deeper affections take the place of the interests, the occupations, and the affections of our early years. So too should it be in religion. Men have dwelt upon the love of God because they could not satisfy the craving of nature for the love of their fellow men. They have looked forward to eternal happiness in a future life because they could not find temporary happiness in this. It is these reflections which point out the way in which the void left by the removal of the religious affections should hereafter be supplied. The effort of those who cannot turn for consolation to a friend in heaven should be to strengthen the bonds of friendship on earth, to widen the range of human sympathy and to increase its depth. We should seek that love in one another which we have hitherto been required to seek in God. Above all, we should sweep away those barriers of convention and fancied propriety which continually hinder the free expression of affection, and force us to turn from the restrictions of the world to One towards whom there need be no irksome conformity to artificial regulation, and in speaking to whom we are under no shadow of reserve.

Were we thus permitted to find in our fellow creatures that sympathy which so many mourners, so many sufferers, so many lonely hearts, have been compelled to find only in the idea of their heavenly Father, I hesitate not to say that the consolations of the new religion would far surpass in their strength and their perfection all those that were offered by the old. Towards such increasing and such deepening of the sympathies of humanity I believe that we are continually tending even now. Meantime, while we are still far from the promised land, the adherents of the universal religion are not without a happiness of their own. Their faith is at least a faith of perfect peace. Untroubled by the storms of controversy, in which so many others are tossed about, they can welcome all men as brothers in faith, for all of them,