BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $ 47. Provisional of God. under this image. Some of these attributes are the consequence of the choice of the worshipper, some are inherent in the object chosen, and are the reason for the choice. The secret of the power which Jesus manifestation of Nazareth exerts over individual men lies in the nature of the love which he offers; they hold him to be divine because he offers a divine affection, that is, an affection unconditioned except by the condition of return; superior to every consideration of unworthiness, of disgrace, and even of self-condemnation and remorse; an affection as unmixed as that of a mother, yet not like that involuntary, or which will not hear of shame, but one that faces and overcomes shame in its own strength, knowingly, in order to annihilate it for ever. The moral grandeur of Jesus Christ in this respect is, so far as I know, entirely without a parallel in history; but it is a grandeur which the facile admission of his divinity tends to conceal, by leading us to regard it as a matter of course. 3. Prayer, it has been already said, is the volitional moment or act of communion between the worshipper and the person worshipped. As in the case of the term sanction, so, in that of prayer, the term includes two things, religious and non-religious prayer. It is only the latter which is used as a means of attaining some desired object. Whenever, and so far as, we prefer a request as a means of attaining what we wish for, we are not praying in the religious sense of the term. Yet religious prayer often takes the form of a request, "Give us our daily bread" for instance. The explanation of this is, that prayer is the expression of a strongly felt wish; but the expression of this wish is always combined, in BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $47 Provisional of God. of religious prayer, with the feeling of resignation. The combination of the two images thus wrought in the mind of the worshipper is the end and purpose manifestation prayer. In all strong feelings which are approved by the moral sense, religious prayer is the natural expression of them; in feelings of joy, of whatever kind, the prayer becomes thanksgiving, -the expression of gratitude; in doubt, or on the entering upon any hazardous undertaking, prayer becomes the expression of a wish with resignation; in grief, from whatever cause arising, it becomes an outpouring of complaint; but in all cases alike it is the drawing near in thought, the energetic reproduction in imagination, of the person prayed to, along with renewed dwelling on the objects which occupy our own feelings at the time. The answer to prayer consists in the increase of the joyful emotions, the decrease of the painful ones, either immediately or after an interval; and this is the end or purpose which the prayer itself desires; this and not the obtaining a request is the rλos of the act. This answer is as certain to follow as the effect on its cause in any of the most certain successions of events in the physical world. It is one case among those which constitute the general law, that voluntary mental energy is accompanied by a certain general mode of pleasure which is its inseparable reward. It may be said that the whole of religion is contained in prayer. 4. It is a feature in religion that doubt and sorrow, whether for calamity from without, or for moral evil in ourselves, are much more readily the beginning of religion than is any form of joy. The call of the preacher is responded to most gladly by those who suffer and by those who repent. This by no means proves that religion, even in its sublimest moods, is not suitable to, or the natural completion of, the joyful emotions. The reason why it is less frequent in them is this, that the effort of imagination requires a stimulus, and in most men a very powerful one, to exertion. Joy is of itself, when an object is enjoyed, a reason for resting in the same kind of satisfaction as that of the present moment. Neither the effort of thought in any shape, nor that of poetical imagination, is willingly made when we are in the full enjoyment of ease, wealth, and prosperity; a circumstance which must have immense weight in contributing to the decay of prosperous nations and societies. Again, continued or habitual solitude, the isolation from the usual intercourse of common life, so as to throw the mind back upon itself, is an almost necessary condition for really enjoying the most highly imaginative poetry; only in such a way can the mind bend itself to meet the poet on the imaginative heights which he treads, or obtain an insight into the emotional secrets which he describes. Again, sorrow and isolation and disgrace intensify the feeling of tenderness towards those friends whom we have, and the heart bounds towards them with eagerness. Shakespeare's well known sonnet, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes and many others which might be cited, is ample proof BOOK I. § 47. Provisional manifestation of God. BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $48. Retrospect. by continued reflection and watchfulness, the blessing is proportionate to the effort. That religion is the crown and completion of all emotions, joyful as well as painful, is shown by this, that religion alone of all the great passions is calm and peaceful; it is a passion, yet not uneasy. § 48. 1. One word in retrospect over the whole subject of religion. No attempt has been made here to prove that religion is true, but only to analyse it and state the result. Religion, like sense, is immediate feeling, and every feeling has its own object or framework, as I have called it, inseparably combined. The truth of religion consists in the permanence of the feeling together with its own framework, under the clearest light that can be thrown on it by historical investigation and analysis, and by new experience in the future. The fact of its permanence must speak for itself. It is useless to try to prove that such and such an object ought to be the object of religion; the only question is this, what object is so. To discover this, it is requisite to analyse correctly religion as an emotion, for this analysis gives emotion and framework at one and the same time. There are no accidents, ovußeßrxóra, in religion. In this as in all cases, the connection between emotion and framework is necessary matter. If a different framework is substituted, on whatever grounds, a different emotion will be found pervading it. Everything depends on the emotion which is in view when religion is spoken of. Now it will be seen, perhaps objected, that I have gone to the Christian Scriptures, the writings of the New Testament, for the account of what religious emotion is. It is true that I have done so, and for this reason, that I find among them the expression of feelings and of truths which, as Coleridge said, "find me," that is, approve themselves immediately to my mind as accurate and true, in a way which no other writings do, except such perhaps as have drawn their inspiration from the same source. For a precisely similar reason I go to Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, for the expression of the profoundest insight into the truths of philosophy. I know no criterion of truth, such that it can infallibly decide now what will be true hereafter. We are all seekers of truth, workers towards truth; we take whatever immediately approves itself to our minds, and endeavour to harmonise it into a consistent whole. Of what will be true hereafter we can now say only this, that it will be a consistent whole, for that is part of the definition of what we are seeking; but whether this mass of facts, or that mass of facts, as we now hold them, will form part of that consistent whole which we anticipate,-of this there is no infallible criterion at hand. 2. Turning our view back upon the whole course of this Chapter, the question which I would suggest is this, does or does not the analysis performed in it bear out the view stated in § 39, that the meaning of this world which we inhabit consists in the feelings, and chiefly among them in the emotions; not in the formal part of existence or consciousness, or in the frameworks of the emotions? Purely speculative or logical objects, that is, objects which are defined by formal or logical relations, such as are rò ev, rò öv, force, power, substance, cause, first cause, all of which must be conceived as ontological or absolute objects, since they are the union of formal relations alone into some supposed empirical or complete object, cannot BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 48. Retrospect. |