Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/450

440 carnal or worldly blessing for which one had at first invoked divine aid a new and higher good which one learns to find in the mode of life which religion prescribes. Religion becomes thus not merely instrumental, but educative. From it one learns not so much the way to satisfy one's natural and secular wants, as the way to despise those wants and set one's heart on other things. It is this mingled self-assertion and self-surrender in religion that makes reverence its characteristic emotion. God is both the means by which one realizes one's end, and also a higher law by which one's end is reconstructed.

THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION

The religion in which entire renunciation is most closely approximated is the philosophical or esoteric religion of India. All the varieties of this religion reflect one fundamental attitude to life, the feeling that no good can come of persistent endeavor. The attempt to fulfill desire is hopeless. The Indian does not abandon himself to despair; but he differs from his occidental brother in this, that whereas the latter hopes by divine aid, or in the distant future, to achieve either personal happiness or the perfection of what he calls "civilization," the former regards the whole attempt as founded on error. Its inevitable failure does not signify real failure, but the adoption of a wrong standard of success. According to the teaching of the "Upanishads" even separate individuality is an illusion perpetuated by desire.

When all the passion is at rest That lurks within the heart of man Then is the mortal no more mortal, But here and now attaineth Brahman.

In Brahman, the deeper unity of the world, the individual has his true being and is saved.

The importance of regarding the conception of God, not as the root of religion, but as the product of religion, appears when we come to the consideration of Buddhism. For Buddhism is, in fact, a godless religion, paradoxical as that may seem. It is true that