Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/379

 THE MODERN MIND 361

average man to have far less reality than under the con trasted conditions of more primitive life.

Those deep instincts, indeed, which assert themselves in moments of exceptional crisis or peril and compel us to give a religious interpretation of experience are not in many minds habitually supported by the intellectual processes. In the supreme excitement of those unusual impending dangers, the rational processes are inhibited ; and the naked instincts seem to control the reaction in such situations. The man becomes suddenly religious and calls on God ; but when the excitement is over and he drops back into his ordinary in tellectual grooves, he moves along again on a level on which there is no very definite or urgent sense of the immediate activity of God in the processes of the world. The ordi nary incidents of experience are traced no further than to secondary natural causes, or to human actions and condi tions. In the minds of many people living in our great centres of population the sense of God becomes very faint seems, indeed, to survive only in those fundamental in stincts which form the roots of it; and is rarely awakened into life except in certain great crises, which are probably becoming more rare with the extension of human control.

All experience seems to show that the vitality of re ligious belief is closely connected with the more pressing problems of human existence, if it be not true that it is a flower that grows in the soil of the more urgent hu man needs. Unquestionably the sense of deep need adds greatly to the feeling of reality of those objects in which alone the need can find satisfaction. We elsewhere suggest that faith, in the sense of religious belief, might be defined as the soul s affirmation of the reality of those supersensible objects which seem necessary to the satisfac tion of its fundamental needs. Now, the foremost and most urgent problem of men under modern conditions is not ad justment to a mysterious and uncontrollable physical uni verse. There are still difficulties, of course, in that realm of our experience ; but the conviction exists in many minds

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