Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/413

 HINTON'S LATER THOUGHT. 401 but : Things are good understand and know ". And again : " Keligion is truly the home-feeling of the uni- verse". And in words that at once justify and interpret the charm of Jesus he says : " Is there not something beautiful in the thought that sin pertains to the individual and exclusively so not to man ? Only so deep as the isolated individuality extends can sin extend. And thus it is that sin can be ' washed away ' ; because it is superficial ; because into the actual fact of man's being it does not enter. The sin has stained the self, not the man. And an entirely new thought of the world comes with this. Amid all this sin is the sinless Man ; and we who are sinful are to be brought into one with Him. ' By Man came also the resurrection of the dead. ' He sees at once what the men in all ages who have been profoundly dominated by the religious consciousness have never failed to see, that man cannot be put in an emotionally right relation with the universe without undergoing a process of subordination. This renunciation of the self has never been found very susceptible of a scientific presentation ; it involves, indeed, the converse of the scientific process. Science seeks to express nature in terms of man, and religion can find no rest till man is put into terms of nature, of the universal. Its affirmation is : " Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in te ". It is impossible to say this more clearly in the language of religion than Hiiitoii has done. " If we were self-sacrificing," he says, " we should see that nature is self-sacrifice." And the self he defines as " the way we feel the absence of God ". Philo- sophy and Eeliyion, which is full of these flashes of insight, is especially marked by its insistence on this negation of the self as the only condition of joy and freedom. It is like Antoninus's acceptance of all things that come from nature, as coming thence whence we ourselves come. It is the Theologia Dcutsch : "Nothing is forbidden and nothing against God, but one thing alone, that is, self-will, or that man should will otherwise than the Eternal Will". It is Christ's : " He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it ". And what is the reward of this renunciation ? Let us hear Hinton on this point also. It is joy and freedom, he asserts, that are the end of religion ; self-sacrifice is only the condition, though it may be a condition that is often less, consciously, a condition than an end. " To the man who thus acts with Nature, failure is not nor can be. He does not succeed in life ; his life is success. Even as Nature is not moral, because it is morality. Success