Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 137.djvu/408



RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION

BY BERNARD IDDINGS BELL

is a common enough thing nowadays to find it maintained that what we must have is more religion. No end of bright and clever people say that, by word of mouth and in articles and books. It is not always clear exactly what they mean by it. A careful study of these numerous utterances leads one to the observation that by religion they generally mean a spirit of respectable geniality and law-abiding humanitarianism. There must be no dogma in it, they usually tell us; it must speak as one of the scribes and in no wise with authority. One draws the impression that there must be no ritual in it, either, or very little. It is rather the sort of thing which people feel who listen, in an atmosphere of respectability, to urgings that we should all help one another to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. And we are told that if we all drink of this thin and somewhat saccharine spiritual beverage a wonderful thing is going to happen. We are going to preserve civilization.

I should like to devote a few paragraphs to the saying of two things: first, that this sort of genial good-humor is not religion, but quite another thing, of which we have too much already and not too little; and second, that the purpose of real religion is not to save society but to do something infinitely more worth while.

A wise and Christian woman who teaches in a New England college has described, in words bitter but searching, this modern thing which masquerades as religion. It is ‘suave-mannered,’ she says, ‘pleasant-voiced; endangering nothing in particular; an ornament of the Sunday pew; devoted to good causes in proportion to their remoteness; intent upon promoting safe philanthropies and foreign missions, but, as far as affairs at home are concerned, ignorant alike of the ardors of the mystic or the heroisms of the reformer; cheerfully assuming that whatever is innocently agreeable 1is religious. . . careless dependence upon an affectionate God; a domestic religion, calculated to make life pleasant in the family circle, and curiously at ease in Zion.’

It is a harsh quotation, but not much exaggerated.

What is wrong with this very modern, humanitarian, nontheological, non-liturgical religion is not difficult to see. What makes it banal, what makes it to many people and especially to young people often a bit of a bore, is that its devotees actually suppose that man himself is the centre of the universe. It is more truly anthropomorphic than even the most crude savage superstition. Superstition tells people to worship a God who is like man. This new conception of religion bids us worship man himself.

It is a faith for people without a sense of humor, devoid of imagination. Science has long ago upset the notion which our fathers naively had, that physically everything—sun, moon, and stars—revolves around the earth. At such an idea the modern man smiles indulgently. But our fathers would 384