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to poetry. Literature holds a middle position; it cannot indeed pretend to the rank either of pure poetry or pure science; but on the one side it is moulded by principles of Art, on the other it is the expression of the Opinion of powerful minds, that is, of an opinion which is the pioneer of science. aiming at entertainment it is art, at truth it is knowledge; and it is to the labourers in the field of general literature that is committed the maintenance and advancement of the general or non-technical culture and education of the community.

§ 44. 1. It has been shown in § 38, that the moral sense in its operation subordinates all feelings, and all objects whatever, to two emotions which mutually sustain and interpenetrate each other, love and justice; and that it forms of these an ideal which governs the whole of life. The effecting of this subordination in thought and in act may be called the passion of morality. When this moral ideal has been formed, there arises in it another desire, the desire of feeling it in its greatest intensity, both for the sake of the feeling itself and also in order thereby to effect the subordination of feeling and action, the moral government of life, more thoroughly and securely. These two passions or desires, the one of governing life, the other of intensifying the perception of the governing ideal itself, are inseparable and mutually supporting. This latter passion is Religion; or Religion is the passion of the ideal of the moral sense; and, far from being, as sometimes thought, a mere sentiment, it is a passion which commands action and insists on perfect obedience to its law. But the intensifying of any feeling is also the attentive analysis or knowledge of that feeling; the desire of

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$43. Poetry in language.

$ 44. The religious emotions.

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greater intensity can only be gratified by closer knowledge of its framework. There arises therefore

The religious a knowledge of the framework of the ideal, at the

emotions.

It becomes neces

same time as the passion for it.
sary for us, then, to follow this analysis, and see
what it is, and how its object is related to the Sub-
ject, whose object it is and who feels the passion for
it. It is clear that this process is a mode of imagi-
nation.

2. It is not here the place to prove that every
feeling or conception is real, while it exists as a feel-
ing or conception; that the mere fact of having a
particular feeling or notion is the existence of that
feeling or notion as an object there and then; this
has been done in "Time and Space." The question
here is as to the truth of such a conception or imagi-
nation; in this case, of the ideal of the moral sense,
the object of religion; that is to say, whether this
ideal is necessarily permanent in consciousness, so as
to arise in all cases where there is a moral sense at all,
and in different shapes according to the degree or
mode of development of the moral sense.
marks in the preceding paragraph sufficiently show
that some such ideal is a necessary consequence or
accompanying feature of a moral sense; those which
follow will be an attempt to show that the moral
sense, as above described and analysed, must have
an ideal of the kind now to be exhibited however
feebly and imperfectly.

The re

3. The term Revealed Religion is, as Coleridge truly said, a pleonasm; all religion is revealed. The term revelation means having become self-evident, or evident and incapable of proof. In this sense every immediate feeling, and time and space in all feelings,

This

are revealed. Religion is nothing else than those ul-
timately ideal moral facts, objects, truths, or feelings,
which are revealed in this sense of the term.
may be shown from the common point of view very
simply. Ask any person what he means by revela-
tion, and he will tell you that he understands it to
mean facts, objects, or truths, revealed, i. e. made
known or told to us by God. That is, that there
must be an author of the revelation, a particular
person distinct from the thing which he makes known
to us.
But he cannot rest here; for ask him farther,
how the existence of God, the author of the revela-
tion, is made known to us, and he will answer-by
revelation. How so, you reply, when revelation re-
quires an author as well as a thing revealed? O, he
will say, God reveals Himself to us; He is author and
revelation at once. This is precisely what is meant
above. The terms, That which reveals itself, or, He
who reveals himself, are precisely equivalent to the
term self-evident. In revealed religion, therefore, as
well as in revelation generally, the thing revealed is
not distinct from the author of the revelation, except
as we afterwards distinguish these two parts or ele-
ments in the total object. And therefore, when it is
said that things revealed are certain because they are
revealed by God, this means that they are certain be-
cause they form part of a self-evident object. This
object, however, in reflective emotion, is a Person.

4. The Subject, at its very entrance upon the two ways described in the first paragraph of this §, finds its religious ideal distinguished from its moral ideal, and in this way: the moral ideal consists in the perfect government of its world of thought and feeling by its emotions of love and justice; these emo

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

§ 44. The religious

emotions.

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tions are bound to, or are bound up with, a world of actual feelings, thoughts, and actions, which together constitute the mind and its objects; but the religious ideal, consisting in the perfection, imagined as attained, of this government, consists in an image of which nothing is known but the two emotions of love and justice in an intensity of which there has been no other experience than this anticipatory one. The world or body of these two emotions is entirely provisional, because there is no limit to the changes which may be wrought by an infinite perseverance towards the attainment of the moral ideal.

The

'body prepared" for the religious ideal is entirely
unknown. Hence, while each of the two ideals are
objects of the same Subject, they are at an infinite
distance from each other; the most ideally perfect
man at an infinite distance from God; and yet God
is, as an ideal, in the heart of the humblest man. The
two ideals are like two roads running in the same
direction, and towards the same goal, one of which
ends at a certain point, the other continues out of
sight; or like a railway and a telegraph, which travel
together to the sea, which only the telegraph crosses.
The religious ideal forms a part of the Empirical Ego,
since it is an object of its Subject, but it is on the
extreme verge
of its horizon, the ideal completion of
that part of it which I have ventured to name the
True Ego.
This sameness of the Subject of both
ideals is the condition or ground of the communion
of the soul with God, the act realising which commu-
nion is Prayer; the provisional character of the re-
ligious ideal is the unsearchability of God; its ideal
perfection the awe-inspiring difference between God
and man.

5. Let us now examine the emotions which arise in the Subject in the formation of the religious ideal. They will fall naturally under two heads, those which are felt towards the ideal itself, and those which are felt towards the mind of the Subject in comparison with, or relation to, the religious ideal. God, who is the religious ideal, is the framework of the emotions which are felt, as it is said, towards him. In respect of his love we must feel love; as it is said by St. John, "We love Him, because He first loved us." In respect of his justice we must feel a certain intense admiration, for that is the name of emotion which is excited by beauty or equity of form. Love and admiration when combined together are the complex emotion of Worship. The emotions felt towards our own mind in contemplation of, or relation to, God are intensifications of those of the moral sense itself; they are two, and both refer to past actions or to the present state of the mind; the first is Sin, the intensification of remorse; the second the sense of justification or approval in God's sight, which is the intensification of good conscience.

6. The emotions just described, worship, sense of sin, sense of justification, I will call the primary religious emotions; they are emotions which arise in the framework of the religious ideal, in our contemplation of God. But when we reflect farther upon the relation in which we stand to God, upon the consequences to be drawn from these emotions, as now exhibited, we necessarily arrange them in somewhat varying ways, and experience emotions correspondingly various. The reasonings which we enter on about these primary emotions exhibit aspects of the framework which have their corresponding emo

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

§ 44. The religious emotions.

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