Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/414

 402 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS : cannot have success, even as morality cannot have a moral. Success is yoked to his steps and cannot leave him ; nothing can bring to him other than constant good. Nothing should disturb such a man's equanimity ; for all wrongness and loss are nutritive, the means of higher ends. Whatever happens, my Life has been and is ; Nature has accomplished her ends, God has accomplished His ; and therein I mine. My will is done because and while it is one with The Will. This is success, to find, in all events, my Life." No one who had so clearly realised the essential conditions of the religious life could fail to see the profoundly irreligious character of much of our popular theology. Hinton is perfectly clear as to what is and what is not of religion. The desire for a personal God, the desire for a future life whatever value these conceptions may have had for humanity, whatever may be said about them as scientific truths are not of religion. Love and self-sacrifice, rather than these, have ever been felt as the truly religious facts by those who have most clearly apprehended religion. And Hinton is never weary of insisting that it is not by any vision of a self-contained God that " salvation " is possible ; it is by love and self-sacrifice, the self-sacrifice that w r as supremely displayed in Jesus ; and it is towards man that the developed religious consciousness is turned. We have heard much of the scientific objections to the notion of " the. magnified and non-natural man ". But Hinton's revolt against a conscious and thinking God was emotional even more than intellectual. What he desired was a God to love more perfectly, more naturally. This God is the infinite God, Love ; the love of whom is love of Being, is eternal Life. " The heart delights in Love too great and pure to be personal." And he says elsewhere : " He can- iiot be God that can be denied ; God must be such, the denial of Whom is a contradiction in terms ". And when we do personify our God, it can only be in man. " Humanity is the Being, the object of love." The modern character of Hinton's genius is nowhere more distinctly seen than in these religious utterances. Even at the moment of highest emotional inspiration and indeed chiefly then he never loses sight of reality. His religion is natural or it is nothing. It was the religion of one who had found no end worthy to follow by paths of science or paths of religion but Nature that Nature whom he had " known so long and half loved and half feared and wholly served ". It is these gleams of immediate intuition into the heart of the religious emotion, standing clear for all those whose