Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/239

Rh And, If the supernatural were omitted from our present creeds, the residuum would not be classical paganism. It would be something like what paganism would have been if religious feeling had not been weakened by the growing complication of human life. Had men's minds continued as religious in the age of Aristotle as they were in the days of Homer, it is not difficult to see how paganism would have developed. The great product of civilization is the development in men's minds of the feeling of justice, duty, and self-sacrifice. These new feelings, then, would have embodied themselves in new deities, or new conceptions of old ones. Paganism in developing would have become moral, and so would have lost all the charm which the moderns, tired, of morality, find in it. And in doing so it would not necessarily have given more weight to the supernatural, and might easily have given less. Notions of duty and morality have no necessary connection with the supernatural. The worship of God in Nature, therefore, the worship of the Being revealed to us by science, would not be a religion without morality, because, however science may repudiate the supernatural, it cannot repudiate the law of duty. To human beings that have reached a certain social stage, duty is a thing quite as real as the sun and stars, and exciting much deeper feelings. In the sense in which we are using the word, duty is a part of Nature. The worship of Nature, therefore, would be no paganism. It would not be mere animal happiness or aesthetic enjoyment of beauty. It would be far more like Christianity. It would be mainly concerned with questions of right and wrong; it would be in almost as much danger as Christianity of running into excesses of introspection and asceticism.

But, now that we are on our guard against this misconception, let us go somewhat further back to inquire what the religion of God in Nature will be. The word religion is commonly and conveniently appropriated to the feelings with which we regard God. But those feelings—love, awe, admiration, which together make up religion—are felt in various combinations for human beings, and even for inanimate objects. It is not exclusively but only par excellence that religion is directed toward God. When feelings of admiration are very strong, they find vent in some act; when they are strong and at the same time serious and permanent, they express themselves in recurring acts, and hence arise ritual and liturgy, and whatever the multitude identifies with religion. But, without ritual, religion may exist in its elementary state, and this elementary state of religion is what may be described as habitual and permanent admiration.

Religious feeling readily connects itself with the supernatural—"Gern wohnt er unter Feen, Talismanen" —but, at the same time, religious feeling can restrain itself, and sometimes even deliberately chooses to restrain itself from all associations of the kind.