Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/259

Rh children of Israel received without idealization the statements of their great law-giver. To them the tables of the law were true tablets of stone, prepared, engraved, broken, and reëngraved; while the graving tool which inscribed the law was held undoubtingly to be the finger of God. To us such conceptions are impossible. We may by habit use the words, but we attach to them no definite meaning. "As the religious education of the world advances," says Principal Caird, "it becomes impossible to attach any literal meaning to those representations of God and his relations to mankind which ascribe to him human senses, appetites, passions, and the actions and experiences proper to man's lower and finite nature."

Principal Caird, nevertheless, ascribes to this imaging of the Unseen a special value and significance, regarding it as furnishing an objective counterpart to religious emotion, permanent but plastic—capable of indefinite change and purification in response to the changing moods and aspirations of mankind. It is solely on this mutable element that he fixes his attention in estimating the religious character of Individuals or nations. "Here," he says, "the fundamental inquiry is as to the objective character of their religious ideas or beliefs. The first question is, not how they feel, but what they think and believe; not whether their religion manifests itself in emotions more or less vehement or enthusiastic, but what are the conceptions of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth?" These conceptions "of God and divine things" were, it is admitted, once "materialistic and figurative," and therefore objectively untrue. Nor is their purer essence yet distilled; for the religious education of the world still "advances," and is, therefore, incomplete. Hence the essentially fluxional character of that objective counterpart to religious emotion to which Principal Caird attaches most importance. He, moreover, assumes that the emotion is called forth by the conception. We have doubtless action and reaction here; but it may be questioned whether the conception, which is a construction of the human understanding, could be at all put together without materials drawn from the experience of the human heart.

The changes of conception here adverted to have not always been peacefully brought about. The "transmutation" of the old beliefs was often accompanied by conflict and suffering. It was conspicuously so during the passage from paganism to Christianity. In his work entitled "L'Église Chrétienne," Renan describes the sufferings of a group of Christians at Smyrna which may be taken as typical. The victims were cut up by the lash till the inner tissues of their bodies