CHAPTER IX

FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY

The matter of the antagonism of the low Christian personnel against philosophy and all learning may have far deeper involvements than those suggested by merely historical incidence. There may be the apprehension of a natural or at least inevitable hostility between good motive activated in uncultured minds and similarly good motives activated in minds given to prolonged and profound reflection and keen analytic thinking. Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Revolt Against Civilization, has been quoted as establishing that there arises always an animosity on the part of the uncultured populace against the aristocracy of intelligence. It might be readily attributable in part to the envy of the possession by the learned class of that which gives its possessor decided advantages. Again it may be seen as part of the general reaction of those occupying inferior status and privileges against those enjoying the fortunes of a superior rank. Poverty looking across the great social gulf that has too generally separated the mansion from the hovel, would include its preoccupation with cultural objects such as philosophy. That which social superiority flaunts in the face of penury as an exclusive possession or activity will breed envy and hatred. It may cover the ground of explanation of the case in early Christianity to consider it in this light.

At any rate the point is deeply inwoven into the texture of a larger situation which must now be the subject of searching analysis. It becomes necessary to deal with another aspect of the relation of religion to culture, one that has the greatest need of being acutely diagnosed and brought into clearer focus. Continued study accentuates more and more dramatically the ineluctable fact that this cleavage and disparity of wisdom between esoteric students and the masses practically marks also the division of human thinking and feeling between philosophy and religion. It pronounces almost with final decisiveness the judg-

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ment that it is the prerogative of the learned to possess and enjoy the blessings of philosophy, while it is the lot, if not the necessity of the masses to be limited to religion and sustained by its assurances and promises. This view at once sets philosophy and religion sharply over against each other in a distinction of rating, quality and value. As opposition will be registered to the formulation, it must therefore be studied more deeply.

The distinction in most minds between religion and philosophy is generally quite vague. It is thought commonly that a man's religion takes in his philosophy; that, broadly speaking, the two are about one and the same. This may be true to a minor degree. For fruitful discussion succinct definitions are demanded. Philosophy is that which a mind holds to be the truth it can apprehend of the meaning of life and the world. It is a mental enterprise or accomplishment. It is a body of intellectual conceptions embodying one's understanding, true or otherwise, of the nature and meaning of life.

Only very loosely, however, can it be called one's religion. That comes into the scene when the philosophical activity of the mind generates something that attends or follows it in another segment of psychic functionism. That new element is the disposition to consecrate oneself more or less completely, in an area beyond the domain of mere intellection, to the intellectual view adopted as a philosophy. It emerges when there is a transferal from the abstractly mental view over to another realm of the psyche's activity, wherein that which is first thought upon in the abstract generates the individual's action in the concrete. It engages the psychological elements of mystical or emotional feeling and the final commitment to overt action. It brings to active operation such psychological energizations as those covered by the words devotion, consecration, allegiance. It is a disposition psychologically assumed to act in loyal accord with the principles or maxims that have been adopted as true and good in the philosophical purview. So religion can be tersely defined as philosophy emotionalized--as perhaps conversely philosophy might be said to be religion rationalized. When people stand ready to fight--or die--for their settled convictions, or consecrated to live loyally for them, that surely constitutes their religion. If a person entertains--as one really must--ideas about the meaning of life, but is totally indifferent about supporting or witnessing for them, he may be a philosopher, but is hardly a religionist.

People unused to critical distinctions in commonplace thought, generally confuse the two in one broad reaction in consciousness. They

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have come to certain beliefs about life and their commitment or loyalty to them follows as automatically as a muscular action follows a nerve impulse. The mental and the emotional components of the double operation do not get distinguished; or do so only in the case of the philosopher. The actual case is found to be that people mingle their philosophy and their religion in one motivation. In some the mental or philosophical interest predominates more or less completely; in others it has little say, the emotional or actualizing motivation ruling the life.

But this failure to classify the two elements in different compartments for the purposes of determining the basic issues involved in the mind's adoption of and consecration to a given philosophy is seen to be fraught with catastrophic consequences. It introduces a feature of the situation that becomes critically momentous for all human culture. It concerns the matter of the truth or falsity of one's philosophy. If religion is the individual's psychological attachment to a set of beliefs about the world of life, it matters quite decisively, for weal or for woe, whether the attachment, the devotion, the sacrifice, is rendered to principles that are true or that prove to be false. Modern psychology of the psychoanalytic stamp is firm in its pronouncement that attachment to an erroneous belief, or failure of attachment to a sound creed, is fatal to the normal balance or sanity of the mind. It is thus a discovery, or at all events a thesis now demonstrated by the overwhelming evidence of clinical and empirical investigation, and is to be rated as one of the most momentous scientific findings in ages. The eminent psychologist C. G. Jung declares after years of clinical study and practice that a mind not balanced, or as they say, integrated by a positive philosophy grounded in reason will break down in psychotic disease.

In the light of this epochal disclosure nothing could be clearer than that the most critical element in the entire problem of the life of culture is the content of the philosophical code adhered to. This conclusion apparently flies in the face of the most general opinion, which inclines to think that in the domain of religion it is not the intellectual content of one's belief that counts most for the good life, but the strength of the disposition to piety and devoutness. It is the psychological attitude of sincere commitment to a program assumed to be right and good, and not the system of rational theology, that constitutes the substance of the religious addiction. So firmly and extensively has this persuasion become established that the whole study of religion as theology has fallen into disrepute and practical desuetude among all

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the laity. And in a broad sense it is true to say that theology weights so lightly in the counsels of modern religion that it has been relegated almost out of sight, with a more "practical" application of the religious spirit taking its place. Ordinarily church folk know little or nothing of the theological principles on which even the sect they adhere to rests, or on which it took its rise as a dissent from some former faith.

Our averment, then, that the theology, which is the rational formulation of the grounds for a given faith or religious adherence, is of far more vital influence for the good life than the sheer force of religious persuasion or afflation of religious feeling, should come as something of a challenge to conventional thinking. It is confirmed as true by the simple logical consideration that if health and sanity hang on the issue of what one understands or fails to understand truly as to the plan, purpose and meaning of life, then the final good of all psychic culture is a matter of how true or how false are the ideas that form the framework of one's philosophy. This throws the onus of the problem back upon that side of it that the unthinking masses abhor, because they are virtually incapable of understanding and therefore of handling it. "The common herd" even of piously disposed people resent it when religion is made a matter of the mind and its knowledge or its thinking power. To it true religion must ever be sheer pious inclination, goodness of "heart," no matter how inadequately interwoven or intermixed it is with the follies of undeveloped intellection.

The ultimate criterion, however, is located in the perception that is inescapable, that, as psychology scientifically proves, the decisive factor in the life of culture is not the measure of one's psychological devotion to a commitment, that is to say, one's religion, but the measure of the truth of the commitment itself, that is, what one understands about the total meaning of life, or one's philosophy. Prof. Hocking's statement that there is no cure for mental disease without consulting the total meaning of the world is most relevant here. People have en masse generally accepted the idea that the force of one's consecration to pietistic interests was the certain gauge of a true religion. But this is a delusion which happily is now exorcized both by reason and empirical psychology. The decisive thing is not the volume, vigor or vehemence of the element of devotion, but the harmony with truth and reality of those conceptions to which the loyal sacrifice is being emotionally made. Is it not significant that mental sanatoria always have a larger percentage of inmates who are there by reason of weird re-

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ligious idiocies and fanaticisms unbalanced by any intellectual restraint, than are admitted for any other cause? The egregious misconception that still sways common thought is that the devoutness is the sure pledge of goodness and righteousness, when in direct contrariety to this the truth is that the crucial element is not the fact or the force of the devotion, but the rightness or falsity of the philosophical principles to which the devotion is paid. It is not by mere chance that religion has found a synonym in the word "devotion." Religious exercises are commonly termed "devotions." "A life of devotion" means a religious life, not specifying at all to what the devotion is to be directed, other than just--religion.

Ages of sad miscarriage of good intent could have been obviated and culture kept sanified, if there had been held constantly in view the discernment that the nobility of religion lay not in the sheer fact or fiat of "devotion," but was at all times to be determined by the criteria or the trueness or goodness, falsity or folly of the objective upon which the devotion was to be lavished. In brief the chief determinant in the issues of the life of religion was not the attitude of piety, but the nature of the mental objects upon which the piety was to be expended. And this finding for good and all constitutes philosophy as the prime and ultimate element of decisive value in the religious quest. Philosophy gains the verdict as the final arbiter of good in the life of devotion. And there is implicit in this conclusion enough dynamic significance to generate a sweeping revolution in the world's present religious life.

Piety and devotion are still accorded a high rank as noble and laudable attitudes. But it must now be recognized that their nobility and worth are to be judged finally by the philosophical rectitude of the intellectual objectives upon which they are showered. The sorry record of history which shows the pitiful wreckage and devastating power of devotions wrongly directed toward unholy ends, is sufficient attestation of the soundness of the judgments here adduced.

It comes back, then, to the dictum of truth that those who have not earned the benison of philosophy must linger on under the sway of the forces of religion. Religion inexorably is for the multitude; the intellectual aristocracy have earned the right to philosophy. Religion must perforce be as a boon and a support for those many who have not climbed to the heights from whose summits the beauteous land of philosophy can be glimpsed in all its fine enchantment. Religion is ever for those for whom pious disposition must serve, because they have not cultivated the intellectual perspicacity to understand wisdom

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hidden in mysteries. The only element that can end religion or the need of it is knowledge. With all thy getting, get wisdom, get understanding. For then one can release oneself from the bonds of pious fealty to trusted revelation or authoritative dictum and rest in blessed understanding. It is impossible that man's highest beatitude, namely peace of mind, can come until it rests on positive inner understanding. Ye shall know the truth and it alone shall set free.

It has been more or less vaguely sensed by capable thinkers that religion represents the failure or default of knowledge, or of philosophy; but it has not been bluntly stated, owing to the hypnotizing mental palsy exerted by the common regard for pietism. Mankind has ever tended to bow before devoutness, as if a devout man were sacrosanct by his closeness to Deity, or as if he touched influences under which all men have been taught to bend as to the presence of Deity itself. From the crushing force of this obsession only knowledge of the truth, or philosophy, can emancipate one. Lacking the enlightenment of knowledge and understanding, the human being has no recourse but to fall back upon the strength believed to flow from faith, hope, prayer, belief and the effort to win the support of an unknown Providence.

Echoes of the drastic thesis here propounded are to be heard in more than one modern work on religion, philosophy and psychology. Already has been noted Miss Langer's statement that the myth-making instinct belongs not to the lowest order of mentality but to a lofty philosophical capability and that philosophical thought is the last reach of genuine religion, its consummation and finally its dissolution. For as Scripture so well expresses the great truth here under discussion, in the finale of human perfection faith is lost in sight. And faith is religion and sight is philosophy. So religion must ultimately be swallowed up and disappear in the luminous apocalypses of philosophy.

If this relative view of religion as handmaiden to philosophy were widely recognized it would at one stroke reorient man's idea of religion to a new conception, so as to change it completely from a tyranny in the mental domain to an agency of liberation. It would open all blind eyes to the vision of religion as a thing to grow through and beyond, instead of a force to be enslaved to through life. The realization that religion is to serve but as a support for humanity through the period of its childhood ignorance and a crutch to be cast aside, or a scaffold to be torn away when the edifice of philosophy has been

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erected, would edify human life to such an extent that all existence would be cheered and brightened immeasurably.

Several of the strongest expressions on the subject are discovered in a strong work, Psychology and the Promethean Will, by William H. Sheldon. He writes (p. 69):

"The inability of the undeveloped mind to tolerate and intellectualize conflict constitutes the deepest bafflement of civilization."

If one can not rationalize the flow of events to see how beneficence is working to its divine ends through their incidence one becomes the hapless and helpless victim of outer circumstance. This is equivalent to saying that one is condemned to the greatest unhappiness. Sheldon's dynamic utterance restates the proposition that the "undeveloped mind," from the sheer fact of its undevelopment, is not equal to the task of bringing life under the eye of understanding, and must therefore abide on the lower levels where religion takes on predominantly the cast of dependence upon a Power deemed gracious enough to hear cries and pleas. Religion becomes then essentially a cult of worshipful rites and ritualistic techniques, inciting to emotional states found adaptable to the effort to throw the human self upon the mercies, tender or harsh, of the Power assumed to be dominating life. It is sycophantic, it is servile, showing in ugly form the character and quality that Nietzsche so furiously resented and anathematized in Christianity.

Au contraire, philosophy, by fortifying the mind with a knowledge of the laws which are seen to be the ordained will of Infinite Beneficence, inspires the mortal with the high spirit of adventure in winning benefit through obedience to these ordinances. The very knowledge that such obedience will bring the blessings that prayer must beg for obviates for the thinker the need for pleading. "All the things that thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her," asserts Proverbs, in its majestic tribute to wisdom, understanding. Fawning at God's feet still implies the worshipper's uncertainty, doubt, fear and helplessness, the basic elements of religion. Knowledge, the coefficient of philosophy, removes the uncertainty and the insecurity, and generates the happy consciousness that salvation lies within one's own grasp.

There is a citation of some length from Sheldon's work which so pointedly expresses what is here asserted that it is hard to pass it by (p. 199):

"The churches are filled with thousands of individuals who have bought a cheap religion and have promptly become a dead weight. They call them-

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selves religious and in the eyes of the observant young they pass as the religious population. The influence they wield is labeled religion, and it produces fearful confusion. That is what makes it necessary to devote such a study as this almost altogether to the definition of elementary concepts, and that causes half or more of the men and women I know whose opinions are worth while to feel that the wisest course is to abandon the concept of religion altogether, to leave it to those people who have cheapened it, and to let them wallow in it until it disintegrates entirely, in the meantime replacing it, if possible, with better-built psychological concepts. The contempt for religion created in the best minds by the loading of religious institutions with people whose . . . development seems to have come to an abrupt end when they joined the Church, constitutes one of the poignant perplexities of our culture. In something they must ground a faith, for it is by faith one must live after selling out the chance to grow a mind. Whatever substitute may in time appear for the present formulary religion, this will likewise become the source of the faith of kind but unintellectual souls, and then it, too, will be in the same sense a cheap religion."

These are words of trenchant truth and they stand almost as if written to buttress the points here projected.

Sheldon (pp. 187-189) writes luminously about the Christian suppression of the Promethean element in human psychology. Space to cite all this splendid material corroborative of our theses is lacking, but it would be a virtual revelation to those steeped in the lethargy of pious ignorance, with critical faculties silenced by religious hypnotizations.

But the inviolable authority of our presentment needs no merely literary confirmation, however impressive. Its rightness is established beyond cavil or debate by the collective experience of thousands of people of education who, having passed in youth beyond the period of naive religious indoctrination in lifeless orthodox formulas, and having reached by study an emancipation from earlier crudities of belief, finally come to the point described by Sheldon where they see it is far better to drop the religious pretense altogether. All these liberated minds, when they cut the umbilical cord that tied them to the inanities of youthful Sabbath pietism, find themselves experiencing a release and freedom as from a devil's own curse of conscience, that amounts to a complete regeneration of the buoyancy and health of mind and body.

Not to be missed is Sheldon's pungent statement (p. 70):

"In the past religion has bound minds together effectively only at a low level of intellect. It is a vital question whether men can find a way of

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using religion as a cohesive and protective force in binding together minds determined to intellectualize conflict and so to achieve a common purpose at high levels of self-understanding."

Precisely this is the confirmation and the ground of our dictum that minds can be bound together at high levels only by philosophy. Religion is for the benefit of minds that can not reach to the plane of intellect. Philosophy comes in with its light of reason and understanding to lift minds out of that lower realm up into the place where man's divine dowry of rational conception can illumine the way. Surely man must call upon some benignant Power to take him by the hand and lead him aright as long as he does not kindle that true light that must be set aglow within his own being. For until he lights up that lamp, he dwells in comparative darkness. Religion is thus seen to be the kindergarten of the human evolutionary school system; philosophy comprises the upper grades, the college, the post-graduate degree.

The infinite pity of it all is that the ministrations of religion for the greater part are not at all what they are believed or hoped to be, guiding lights to simpler minds who must be helped to tread their way in the semi-darkness till they find the inner light. All too generally they are not truth simplified, good milk for babies, but tragically sheer delusion and infatuation, milk gone sour. This is the risk and the unfortunate outcome whenever esoteric formulations are given forth to the multitude without the possibility of the true sense being at least in some measure kept alive. So Sheldon comments most discerningly (p. 57):

"Even in modern times individuals find in delusion a short cut to wholeness. The cry is still raised that the magic formula has been found, and always there are unhappy thousands eager to ring the echo to the cry. . . . Any new religion, however cheap, gives a sense of character for a little time. The human mind is forever lured by an easy way; by some short cut; some salvation by faith alone, which is salvation by dissociation of the intellect. Yet to try to achieve character through mere intensity of the wish is like solving a puzzle by throwing half of it away."

These again are words of keen insight and tremendous import. Sheldon is here passing an intelligent and perfectly just sentence of condemnation upon the hundreds of cult religions that are set up by self-proclaimed leaders of groups, with which our present age is so thickly beset. All advertise the same magic formula for a quick jump at the goal, of course for compensation. Pitiably the multitudes plunge

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or nibble at the old bait. It will be shown that Christianity arose as just one of such cults of a former age, when the content of the preachment might have varied somewhat from present forms, but when spiritual hunger and uncritical naiveté and unbelievable gullibility united to produce fantastic religionism with the same sad consequences as are witnessed now.

So notable are these characteristics of religion that of late years the consensus of the highest thought has been that religion, which formerly (as still too largely) was considered a high motivation, sacred in itself, is no longer to be held in this lofty regard as a noble emotion, but is coming to be seen as virtually a thing of mental and moral weakness, in the view that it is in most of its activations really a cowardly retreat in the face of reality, the refuge of a weak soul, an escape from the brunt of the battle of life. Religion has come to be classed by astute criticism as one of the several "escape mechanisms," which include most of the forms of mystical experience. People who for one reason or another--now being sought and tabulated by psychology--lack the spiritual hardihood to face valiantly up to life's battle, seek refuge and surcease in religious fantasy of one sort or another.

The description is true in the main, but can be too broadly applied. It can even be argued that to a certain degree such refuge-seeking is justifiable, is a beneficent provision of life to enable its developing children to stand the gaff and hold firm under pressure. It can be thought of as a salutary measure on the part of the universal will to gain its ends for its creatural embodiments by permitting them to bend to the strain instead of breaking under it. Even in military science a retreat may in its proper place be a part of winning strategy.

In the large view, however, it must be considered a failure to fight, to play the life game with valor. It too generally betrays a surrender, a retreat in rout. It is the ostrich act of hiding from the horrid reality.

The justness of the view is to be determined by the character of the religion in which refuge is taken or escape sought. And the criterion is again the measure in which that religion is steadied by philosophy, or left to run the gamut of emotional, that is, religious states. This observation, then, opens the door to the consideration that perhaps no other religion in the world has stood to its votaries as the temptress to escape life's strain and pressure of stern realities as the Christian has done. Other religions have held forth equally with the Christian the promises of divine help and salvation, succor in time of distress, from a Deity or deities. Except in the most abject forms of idolatry, in which

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this Deity might have come to be anthropomorphically personalized, the ideal of Deity was in the form of some Power or Intelligence that at best had to be superinduced to act within the sphere of the votary's own life. The manipulation of psychic or devotional states within the individual's own area of consciousness was a necessary part of the process of obtaining divine attention or favor. One had to put oneself in certain conscious attitudes to invite the providential interest. The matter was still largely--and the more in proportion to the intelligence, the less in the ratio of the ignorance--a subjective operation, and the agency of help was within the sphere of the worshipper's mind.

Christianity, on the contrary, offered its followers an actual living person in history, a man talking, eating, doing things that John Smith might do daily. The religion of the Nazarene offered the Nazarene, and in profuse largesse of Scriptural promise, invited all mortals to come and freely throw all their burdens upon his shoulders, as he could bear the infinite load. Buddhism indeed invited the weary mortal to take refuge in a divine sanctuary of power and protection and consolation; but it was a refuge in the Law, not in a living man. The Law had still to be learned and made operative within the directive purposiveness of the recipient of salvation. It was still subjective. Even when the Bhagavad Gita exhorts the devotee to "seek refuge in Me," it is still not a historical man speaking, but the voice of an impersonal Force to which the humble aspirant must himself lend an ear.

But Christianity invites the believer simply to surrender himself and his personal fight and call upon another man in history to win for him. It is the only religion that has embodied the saving grace of Deity in a living personal human being, and made divine Power to be implemented through an individual homo. And every last resource of language has been drawn upon in thousands of sermons, books and theologies to enforce on all believers the idea that a Christian could apply for help to this person, allegedly having lived in Judea, in the same realistic sense in which one could apply for help to an employment bureau or government relief board. No possible conceivable effort or method has been overlooked in the straining to make this saving individual as realistic and humanly concrete as could be done. Every tensing of psychological muscle was exerted to have people pray to this man as if they were addressing him in fleshly presence. This invitation and persuasion are unremitting to the present hour.

The seductive disarming force of such a maneuver in religion is beyond imagination or calculation. Millions of struggling humans,

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distraught over their ill-fortune in the rugged going in life's journey, and unintelligent, have inevitably been enticed by this temptation. The call to cast all their burdens upon him, indeed his own "Come all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," is powerful to the point of virtual hypnotization of all critical opposition. In Christianity, then, there is the most potent psychological force ever exerted upon the masses of humanity to dodge the hard fight and seek an easy refuge in a haven located outside themselves. It has been a phenomena, demonstrated in limitless volume over centuries, to the boundless confusion, misery and disappointment of Western man.

The escape into religion is a hollow delusion. It is an escape from one cell of the prison of ignorance into another, with less possibility there of the mustering of real strength to get out. How can one escape into a condition which is itself a house of bondage? The etymology of the word "religion" is very suggestive as to this. It is from the Latin re, "back," and the stem lig, "to bind or tie." It is therefore a binding the mind back to either the basic source and reality of life, from which in its pilgrimage through the elements it has traveled far from base, or in a less noble sense, a binding back to the trammels of earth and sense from which man is expected in the course of his evolution to free himself. If it is taken in the first sense of a binding the fragment of consciousness to the divine or cosmic whole, then in its ultimate reference it becomes not a binding but a freeing force, for only in perfect union with God is there freedom. The perfected alone enjoy "the liberty of the Sons of God." All life short of that is slavery, as Paul says, to "the elements of the world."

There is no escape into religion and no escape out of it until one graduates into the upper grade of philosophy. If the world of intelligence can catch the idea that religion constitutes a grade in the cosmic curriculum, and one that is to be as quickly as possible passed through by the scholar, the stern face of human history can relax into a softer mien. Like a grade in the public schools, religion should be considered in its true function as a way station that exists not to hold its pupils, but to pass them on to a grade above it. The fatal blunder, to which there has apparently been no awakening in the circles of religion itself, has been in thinking that the human soul can be perpetually lodged in the religious house by the wayside. As Hopper says in his The Crisis of Faith, man is a viator; he is on his way; he is bound on a long journey. But religion would catch and hold him to its "binding back." Religion is reluctant to bid him God-speed on the longer path. Re-

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ligion would shield him, caress him, mother him overlong to the detriment and eventual atrophy of his own powers. It is the fond mother that can not tolerate the thought of seeing her child step out from her nurturing home and care, to wage his battles out in the purlieus of an evil world. She is fearful of letting the believing mind of the youthful soul become subject to the critical assaults of rationalism on trusting faith, such as it will encounter when it delves into philosophy.

The outcome of the discussion on this point should be the firm hypostatization of a completely new view as regards religion. It should be categorically realized that as long as religion serves merely as a harbor or reliance and dependence on God viewed as a Power exterior to man's own spirit, it is in truth a form of escape from that necessary meeting with reality as it presses closer and closer upon the living soul, and as such it is a retreat, a childhood protection, a hugging the shelter of home in reluctance to brave the adventure in which the soul must overcome the world to win its crown. It is the coddling of a soul not yet strong enough to make its own fight. And in so far as it ties the initiative, the adventurous spirit of man down into grooves of complacent security and mediocrity, it is indeed a binding back of the wings of the soul, as Plato so graphically dramatizes it.

How ingloriously religion can bind people back to fixed anchorages in its indoctrinated dogmas and shibboleths is indicated by John Dewey (Philosophy and Civilization, p. 54), when he says that in large part religion is "hopelessly at the mercy of a Frankenstein philosophy which it originally called into being to be its own slave."

And how tightly one of these fixations of theological ideology can bind the free soul of him who accepts it can be seen if we note how even Guignebert interprets the doctrine of the saving office of Jesus in Christian systematism. He says that Jesus' death becomes clearly intelligible in the light of the theological formula that through it all men were provided, in a way that had never been opened to them before, with a means of their salvation. All men had crumpled under the weight of their sins. They were unable to right themselves and face the divine light. But Christ had come to offer them the required means; he took their guilt upon him and expiated their sins through his death of ignominy. Then, that they might share in his accomplishment and find grace in the day of judgment, it was expedient first of all to effect a union with himself through faith and love. What a monster Frankenstein this dogma is bound to become to any soul that takes it in its historical reference to a man living in Judea two

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thousand years ago, instead of entirely to a process of transfiguration of his mind by its union with the higher mind of the Christos developed to ruling power within his own consciousness, is surely apparent to any thinking person.

As to this particular doctrine an observation in passing is noteworthy. Hodges in his work on the early Church brings out the fact that Marcion, the eminent Gnostic, upheld a spiritual interpretation of Scripture in opposition to a religion debased and materialized, holding that the humanity of Christ was only in appearance, that Christ could not have taken on our material flesh which is essentially evil. Along with this it is most interesting to note what Charles B. Waite in his History of the Christian Religion to A.D. 200 says as to the part that this same Marcion played in the formation of Christianity. Waite says that beyond question Marcion's gospel was the original from which the four canonical Gospels were afterwards fabricated by the later Christian plagiarists. He also tells us that pure Christianity has suffered no greater loss than that of the writings of Marcion, the great theological thinker of the second century, compiler of the first complete Gospel, collector of the Epistles of Paul, editor and publisher of the first New Testament. While the elaborate work against him written by Tertullian, who called him a "hound," has been preserved, and the work of Epiphanius, who bestowed on him the euphonious appellation of "the Beast," the writings of Marcion have perished, except such as are found in the references and citations of his adversaries. His works have shared the common fate of those of the heretics of the second century, none of which in their original form have been permitted to come down to us. Waite asks, significantly, why.

Sir Gilbert Murray essays to define the difference between religion and superstition by saying that superstition degrades its worshippers by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without any respect for others or any desire for higher and fuller truth. It may be only an accident, though an invariable one, he asserts, that all the supposed true facts turn out to be false. Superstition is the belief in and action predicated upon false assumptions. But in religion, he says, you know that the truth you draw from it, however precious to you, is a truth seen dimly, and perhaps seen by others better than by you. It is time to add on our part that in philosophy you see truth with the dark glass mediumship removed, all things standing clear at last.

Perhaps the entire truth of the situation under discussion here is to

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be arrived at through the realization that essentially the conflict that eventuated in the production of Christianity was not so much a conflict between Christianity and Paganism as it was simply a conflict between ignorance and learning, between uncultured religious emotionalists and a minority group of esoteric philosophers. With the masses on the side of the former, the religious ferment won out and philosophy went into eclipse. This is evident beyond contradiction if only from the fact that the Gnostics, the more intelligent party that would have held the religion in line with high philosophical interests, were turned out as heretics. Gibbon states that the Gnostics were "the most cultured, the most learned and most worthy of the Christian name." Mosheim, too, says that slender indeed must be the acquaintance with the writings of antiquity of any one who would contend that the followers of the Gnostic ideas were men of low status or errant minds. Many of them, he says, had by their continence and austerity of demeanor acquired a reputation for sanctity and won the love and veneration of the multitude. It might be instructive to compare this statement of the historian with what the Emperor Julian is impelled to report on the Christian party. In his work entitled Arguments Against the Christians (p. 41) he speaks of what comes to light "when we begin to explore the monstrous deeds and fraudulent machinations of the evangelists." And Julian was in a position to know whereof he spoke. The Christian scene in the early centuries presents the anomalous picture of those perpetrating egregious fraud and vandalism in the field of sacred literature casting out as heretics the most cultured, learned and worthy from their community. And this anomaly has been defended, mitigated and condoned ever since.

The honest writings of the philosophers, the Gnostics and many of the learned, such as Porphyry and Celsus, were destroyed by the fanatical Christians; we have left only what the rabid Christian historians, Tertullian, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Hippolytus and others deemed best to write for the advantage of the Church. Gibbon is sure he has ample grounds for saying that.

"The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius, himself indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion."

Gibbon has been joined by a veritable chorus of historical assent to the accusation that Eusebius is untrustworthy, and the others almost equally so. The result of the literary vandalism and the dishonest

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nature of Christian writing have, as Massey so clearly shows, caused the true evidence of the rise of Christianity to lie buried out of sight for a thousand years. The evidence is only now being recovered and pieced together to form the true picture.

Pertinent here is the observation of Manly P. Hall, popular present-day exponent of ancient esoteric philosophy, that

"Philosophy is the least degree of intellectual illusion . . . the least degree of mental error, since all other forms of learning contain a greater percentage of fallacy."

A statement made by Joseph Warschauer in his The Historical Life of Christ should be included here. He says it seems likely that the view which located the coming kingdom in the heavens or which spoke of the descent of a heavenly Jerusalem was confined to the thoughtful and better educated strata rather than spread among the masses. The latter, no doubt, he assumes, held their hope in the most concrete shape,--the overthrow of Rome and a revival of national political independence under a scion of the old Davidic dynasty. This is almost certainly the truth, and it shows, if the showing were needed, what historical hash the "popular mind" can and will make of esoteric spiritual truth and the allegories that have been devised to dramatize it. Warschauer suggests that the idea of a non-physical, non-historical Christ came in from Persia. It did not have to come in from any particular country. The esoteric tradition of a spiritual, in contradistinction to a human personal, Christ was already present, but held back from popular corruption in the hands of the few esotericists. It had to come out rather than come in. But catastrophe for general human interests has ever attended its coming out when that dissemination amongst the incompetent and uncritical masses eventuates in its mutilation and reduction to falsity. It was wrecked by ignorance.

B. A. G. Fuller, whose splendid new History of Philosophy has been cited herein already, ventures to say that wise men can do without religion and even flout the gods. They have risen above the need of or certainly the dependence upon such supports. But it is hazardous to claim that a wise philosopher flouts the gods. The truth of the matter is that he can well disregard the gods, as Epicurus also said, which the common people worship. Surely he discards all notions of the popular anthropomorphic deities. But he has gods of his own conception to whom he does not fail to pay the profoundest homage. But

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such gods are not those the people know about, for they are the personified cosmic powers of mind and matter, the faculties and energies of Universal Being.

Then Fuller places the philosopher far above the needs of religion on another count. The clear knowledge he possesses enabled the philosopher to free himself from the despotism of two giant fears which afflict the religious mind. In elucidating Epicureanism, Fuller states it was the view of this philosophy that men are haunted by two great fears which quite thoroughly inhibit all effort to gain mental imperturbability, or what the Stoics called ataraxia, that is, settled peace of mind and soul. The first of these supernatural and superstitious terrors is the fear of what may lie beyond this life, and the second is the fear of being spied on by the piercing eye, and punished by the interfering hand, of the gods. Thus, the Epicureans claimed, religion, by instituting these two fears alone is the arch-destroyer of human happiness. A philosopher fortifies his mind with a positive knowledge that obviates these fears. Therefore the loss or suppression of this philosophical knowledge has thrown the masses back upon religion, from which, in want of intellectual assurance, they are driven to seek consolation in sheer faith and hope. Fuller says that some of the grandest and most dramatic passages in Lucretius, exponent of Epicurean philosophy, are of the mind's surrender to religion: the cringing before the supernatural; the sense of being spied upon by the gods; the uncertainty of what the gods may decree; the dread of what may befall after death. Men enlightened by philosophy finally awake to this situation and disentangle themselves from its psychological toils. But crafty men catch at it as offering wide opportunity for cajoling the masses into easy dominance. Since it yields such prime advantage to a ruling class through keeping the populace docile and submissive to harsh conditions, its perpetuation becomes an objective of a dominant commercial, social or political ruling hierarchy. This comes to view in what Guignebert says in his fine history, in speaking about the syncretistic religion of the Roman world when the Empire succeeded the Republic (p. 114):

"Educated men no longer have any faith in it, but they respect it in public and, when forced, take part in its rites. They do this because they continue to believe religion obligatory upon the common people, whose dangerous appetites and instincts it holds in check."

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Here is the theme for whatever vituperation any one feels inclined to pour forth upon the hypocrisy and duplicity of designing demagogues and leading citizens, who privately place themselves above the need of religion, but help to support it because it tends to make more secure their position of easy privilege in the social or secular world.

In line with this supercilious and insincere attitude is the remarkable utterance of Synesius, Bishop of Alexandria, in the fourth century:

"In my capacity as bishop of the Church I shall continue to disseminate the fables of our religion; but in my private capacity I shall remain a philosopher to the end."

Celsus has given us some idea of what those "fables" of early Christianity really were, and a perusal of some of the fictitious "Gospels" and "Epistles" that were invented to impress the heathen will give us more. But could any words more vividly convey the truth of what is here contended, that the "people" are to be fed on religion, with all its seductive technique of fable and falsity, while one who has respect for his own integrity of mind will hold on to philosophy?

The popularization of a profound esoteric wisdom or deep subjective mystic perceptions necessarily, then, can be effected only by way of a conversion of philosophy into religion. What stands in the philosophic mind as an enlightening conception emerges in the less intelligent mind as the basis of an emotional reaction. Fuller traces this subjugation of philosophy to religion as operative early in the life of Christianity.

Pliny believed that man worshipped best when he deified himself. He was convinced that the great head of all worlds pays little or no heed to human affairs. Can we have any doubt, he asks, that the divine nature is polluted by such a disagreeable and complicated office? This challenges us to imagine what we impose upon the Eternal when we ask him to turn his attention to all the entanglements of petty and trivial human relations. Pliny ridicules the superstitions of his age.

Lecky observes in his History of European Morals that the love of truth in most men is so languid and the reluctance to encounter the strain of mental understanding is so great that they yield their judgments without an effort to the current of conventional ideas, withdraw their minds from all critical opinion or research and "thus speedily convince themselves of the truth of what they wish to believe." Then he asserts that "an elaborate process of mental discipline with a view to strengthening the critical powers of the mind, is utterly remote

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from the spirit of theology." For this reason, he says, the growth of an inductive and scientific spirit is invariably hostile to theological interests. These statements of Lecky place side by side two strands of analytic thinking: the flaccid, languid temper of the common mind in its attitude toward truth; and the repugnance to mental discipline in the spirit of theology. Are these two manifestations related and if so, how? May the connection not be found in the reflection that since the common mind can not be reached and influenced by the deeper abstrusities of theology and the attempt to instruct it through theology would only confuse and disturb its settled trust in authority, theologians have deemed it wisest to let the sleeping dogs of their doctrinal principles lie? If it had proved historically possible for ecclesiastical power to utilize the abstrusities and subtleties of theology to bind the multitude of common people in loyalty to its program, we may be sure theology would have been developed as a popular weapon of religion. Evidently the languid interest of common man in theology and his obtuseness in grasping its niceties of meaning led to the great silence on the subject.

In view of all this analysis one is not surprised to hear John Dewey saying (The Quest for Certainty, p. 254): "With the expansion of Christianity ethico-religious traits came to dominate the purely rational ones." This was the process of the supplanting of philosophy by religion at work.

There will be vehement challenge to the direct statements and the obvious implications of many things adduced in this chapter, to the effect that philosophy fortifies the human mind with the certitude of knowledge, while religion leaves that mind in the darkness of doubt and hope. Philosophers of the present day will demur to the positiveness of these asseverations. They will say they have not found that certitude in philosophy, and that religion provides, on the whole, surer grounds of confidence than does philosophy. But our reference is to ancient, not modern philosophy; the philosophy that Plutarch was so conversant with, as he expounds and dilates upon its dynamic cogency for the human mind in the following passage (Morals, II, p. 369):

"The true philosophy is of a quite different nature; it is a spring and principle of motion wherever it comes; it makes men active and industrious; it sets every wheel and faculty a-going; it stores our minds with axioms and rules by which to make a sound judgment; it determines the will to the choice of what is honorable and just; and it wings all our faculties to

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the swiftest prosecution of it. It is accompanied with an elevation of nobleness of mind, joined with a coolness and sweetness of behavior, and backed with a becoming assurance and inflexible resolution."

One man's sheer laudation does not, of course, end all controversy. But what this one man--seconded, however, by many others--says has in its support the tremendous volume of evidence of similar character, all of it the outcome of the severest of all proofs,--the pragmatic test. The men of ancient days who conned this arcane wisdom, as well as thousands in later times to the present, add testimony to Plutarch's encomium. It has given the mind this elevation, this insight and this assurance. It is at this moment working its benignant magic of enlightenment and purification of life upon hundreds in the contemporary period, and with such force and satisfaction, such joy and delight in the mind, that it is having a veritable rebirth after thousands of years of obscuration. It carries the evidences of its own rightness, its own trueness, with it. But it must be cultivated with deep love before it yields its fruitage of certitude. There was a primeval revelation; it was not mere speculation; it was the voice of perfected understanding of graduates from the human school. Pythagoras and Plato had recaptured it; Plotinus, Philo, Proclus and Plutarch basked in its sunlit brilliance; Augustine had caught its reflected gleam and testified to its immemorial existence. If civilization is not to perish in the twentieth century it must be made to glow again.

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CHAPTER X

TO FAITH ADD KNOWLEDGE

The subdivision of the theme that falls next in place is the obvious perception that the line of cleavage that marks the boundary between religion and philosophy likewise becomes the frontier between faith and knowledge. A synonym universally employed where a substitute word for "religion" has to be used is just this word "faith." A cognate term for religion is faith. As set forth in our thesis, religion presents faith as its main constituent, and it is for the most part simply an attitude of faith, a want of knowledge being humbly if not often aggressively confessed. It is that source of trust to which the individual soul must look for assurance and peace when the certitude of knowledge is wanting. "Faith" is close to being the literal description of what religion generally is--faith and belief.

On the other hand, philosophy so deeply rationalizes, as Sheldon says, the facts which life presents, and so well catches the marvelous correspondence between the order and harmony of straight thinking and the order and harmony of things, that it lays the solid foundation for the mind's certainty of knowledge, which is the only enduring ground for peace and blessedness in this mortal life.

The vast abyss of difference in authority and vitality between the two, faith and knowledge, or religion and philosophy, is to be discerned when it is reflected that in the case of faith the reliance is placed upon the beneficence of powers outside the self, while in the case of knowledge, it is localized entirely within. The disparity is so immense that there never should have been a question as to which is the more desirable element. The reign of faith is attended with all the mental hazards that spring back from lack of certitude: doubt, vacillation, dread, worry and fear, not to mention constant dependence upon the unknown and unpredictable whim of the trusted Deity. There is no relaxing a tension of expectancy, either of good or evil event. Hope is the final basic reliance.

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One is aware that Christian writers, so often transgressing the rules of dictionary exactitude, stretch the meaning of "faith" until they make it embrace almost what is really full knowledge itself. It is made to consist virtually of such a force of inward conviction, through mystical persuasions, that it is a form of knowledge itself. But this is disingenuous, an evasion and breach of intellectual honesty. If faith is knowledge, then it should be called knowledge.

The whole matter is brought to a sharp focus by St. Paul, who obviously does not telescope faith into knowledge. For he writes: "To your faith add knowledge." Clearly the Apostle is here saying: Faith, brethren, is good--as far as it goes; but it is not enough. It will hold you forever in the kindergarten. If you would grow in grace and in the favor of God you must increase your knowledge. Faith alone will never develop your divinely desired prerogative of conscious cooperation with the will of Deity. It will help you as a child, but when you become a man you must put away childish things and learn to stand in the consciousness of your participation in the intelligent mastership of your own evolution.

This opens the way for the presentation of an item in the current preaching of Christian clergy that should long ago have been seen in better light. Every year records the delivery of thousands of sermons on the need in the world of more faith in God. The cry is that irreligion is rampant, engendered by want of trust in Providence. Men are wild and reckless in their own base conceits and lawless graspings, because they do not recognize the influence of God in the world. Faith is the power that would anchor man more safely to divine beneficence.

The upshot of this unremitting emphasis is that for centuries the Christian mind has been conditioned to the idea that faith is the very pinnacle of spiritual virtue. It is considered to be the peak of Christian attainment, the summit product of the Christian life.

This is an egregious and hurtful misconception, since it throws the scheme of values quite out of proper focus. It places emphasis on the wrong end of the scale of values. It regards as a consummate achievement a feeling that, on the contrary, is an elemental reaction of childlike naiveté. It places at the top of the ladder the rung that actually is the very first and almost automatic step at the bottom. In fact faith in God is almost as inevitable and automatic as breathing. It is as unfailing as an instinct. It is present a priori and is not the product of cultivation.

For what can the human being do but trust in the goodness of life?

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Any other posture of mind toward life would be an anomy. If life is going to be hostile to man, then trust will avail nothing. Man must assume that life will be benignant to him. There is nothing he can do but trust it. Therefore faith, instead of being the climax of growth in man's closeness to God, is the very first and most naive of the virtues. It is almost pre-virtuous, a spontaneous inevitability. It is the first, not the last, in the gamut of virtues. Virtue begins with it and then proceeds to advance from it to higher aspects of development.

St. Paul clearly discerned this status because he begins his ordered series of Christian qualities, taken obviously in the scale of their rank, with faith. "To your faith add virtue and to virtue knowledge." Faith is not the crowning glory of spiritual growth, but its first childlike beginning. This is a vastly needed correction of uncritical religionism.

When the Christian Church, in its violent revolt against the intellectual side of religion, repudiated the importance of knowledge in its system, it was by sheer necessity forced to fall back on faith. Faith, with its sister hope, enters when knowledge leaves. The mind must, of course, start its quest with the confidence that infinite treasures are there to be gained. But this confidence will be replaced or swallowed up as the treasures are unearthed.

Gibbon points out to us one danger that can all too readily flow from the perpetual exercise of faith, when not supported by data of critical thinking and knowledge. It lays the person open, he says, to an excessive and perilous expectancy, generating gullibility:

"The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they were incessantly . . . confronted by visions, instructed by prophecy and surprisingly delivered from danger, sickness and from death itself, by the supplications of the Church. The real or imaginary prodigies of which they so frequently conceived themselves to be the objects, the instruments or the spectators, very happily disposed them to adopt with the same ease . . . the authentic wonders of the evangelical history. . . . It is this deep impression of supernatural truths which has been so much celebrated under the name of faith; a state of mind described as the surest pledge of the Divine favor and of future felicity; and recommended as the first or perhaps the only merit of a Christian."

This places behind the analysis made here the support of Gibbon's forceful logic and historical vision, at the same time that it also cites from history itself the actual evil consequences of the substitution of faith for understanding. But he concludes with a corollary observation

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that again confirms our delineation of the Christian habit of belittling everything Pagan, the better to exalt everything Christian. He adds:

"According to the more rigid doctors, the moral virtues, which may be equally practiced by infidels, are destitute of any value or efficacy in the work of our justification."

The better sanity in Christian minds should years ago have seriously set itself to the task of analyzing the sort of dialectical aberration that could have driven pious people to the invidious position of deriding even their own best virtues when practiced outside their own fold. Again and again one finds Christians denouncing as vices the identical traits or qualities which in their own practice were extolled as supreme religious virtues. We are almost asked to think that virtue practiced by Christians is virtue, but practiced by Pagans it is a vice.

When religion is reduced from an interest engaging the whole man, his spiritual, intellectual, moral and physical qualities, and exercised only in the narrow area of "faith," as so nearly describes the situation in early Christianity, it becomes the parent of many forms and expressions of untoward and harmful reaction. Faith may be never so valiant and perpetually recharged by pietism, but it will not serve to instruct, to enlighten, to guide and to save from irrational venture. It leaves the devotee bereft of arms and armor which he must have to travel securely and avert evil hap. It still and always spells the lack of intelligence. It needs no logic to certify the fact that faith can never supplant knowledge or supply its want. It forever leaves the ignorant person open and subject to the errors that knowledge would enable him to avert. The Church has held its millions in the cradle stage by decrying knowledge and asking them to rely on faith.

In actual world life a religion based on faith is pretty nearly always confined to people of lower and median rank, the intelligentsia for the most part having "risen above it." An immense proportion of those who in childhood go through the customary mill of indoctrination in orthodox groups, leave that early faith as soon as they attain the power to think freely and study historical culture. Nearly all students cast off the puerile reverence for the churchly authority. Thinking, based on a wider range of data, which is only obtained by study, is the accomplishment of the intelligentsia only. It is dialectically necessary, then, that religion should be the cherished interest of the masses, since it is accepted on revered authority and held on faith.

A vivid picture of what the Christian religion became in the sight

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of men with minds equipped and balanced by philosophy is presented in Hodges' delineation of Celsus' antipathy to the Christianity of his day. In his The Early Church (p. 68) he recounts Celsus' disgust over the personnel of the Church on account of their impertinence, which was in exact proportion to their ignorance:

"He was disgusted with their insistence upon confession of sin, and the pride which they seemed to take in having no health in them; they spoke like worms in the mud. . . . As a philosopher intent on the pursuit of truth, he resented the doctrine of faith, which was offered, he thought, as an easy way to attain that which the student gains with labor and difficulty; it puts the ignorant on an equality with the educated; it leads only to illusion."

"Do not examine; only believe": this, he said, was the Christian principle, to be abhorred of all philosophers.

Massey sums up a long series of citations from the eminent literary figures of the Roman world who expressed their contempt of Christianity. He says: "The 'primitive Christians' were men whose ardor was fierce in proportion to their ignorance."

The indifference, antipathy and harsh judgments of the learned of the day toward the early faith have puzzled Christian publicists not a little. Hodges gives expression to this perplexity, when, speaking of Marcus Aurelius, he says (op. cit., p. 65):

"But the blindness of the Emperor was shared by all the eminent men of the day. The most important movement in the history of man, which was speedily to take possession of the Roman Empire and to build a new Rome upon the Bosphorus, and thereafter to dominate the progress of civilization and to save out of the wreck of barbarian overthrow the books of the very men who were writing at that moment in utter ignorance of the meaning of this struggling and depressed religion--this movement began and continued with no attention from the wise and the great. They either overlooked it or regarded the Christians as an insignificant Oriental sect."

In the second century they were made the subjects of satire by Lucian.

This passage of Hodges assumes that in this case the ignorant were wise and the wise were ignorant or blind. The dull and stupid saw with eagle eye what the learned missed. On the whole there is plenty of cause for disturbance and alarm in such a statement as Hodges here makes. It is an ominous event if brainless people in the year 33 A.D. or at any time could descry the cosmic and epochal significance of a religious ferment among the ignorant classes while the truly wise and great missed it entirely. There is something wrong in the way Hodges

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draws this picture, something that Hodges, wise and learned as he is, missed seeing. It is important that he and we alike see what is wrong there. He errs, first, in saying that the movement received no attention from the wise and the great. It had plenty of their attention, as witness what they said of it and the Emperor's persecution of it. Again, it had their attention because they at least took notice of it sufficiently to read its low character and to pronounce severe judgments against it. "A monster superstition," exclaims Pliny. "A pestilence," cries Suetonius. "Exitiabilis superstitio" (Destructive superstition), says Tacitus. "Certain most impious errors are committed by them," says Celsus, "due to their extreme ignorance, in which they have wandered away from the meaning of the divine enigmas." (Origen: Con. Celsum, Ch. VI.) Which statement, comments Massey, "is as true as it is temperate." Porphyry adds his contemptuous opinion and wrote his critique of the movement, a work that surely would have been immeasurably valuable had it not been destroyed by the fell ferocity of hatred of philosophy and its literature.

If Hodges fails to understand why Marcus Aurelius, one of the world's truly eminent philosophers, should have paid little attention to Christianity except to persecute it and otherwise disregard it as beneath his notice, he must find it difficult to see why a great and profound thinker should despise a crude and fantastic religious ferment among a small group of enthusiasts upon whom he must inevitably look down with pity and compassion. His persecution of them was no doubt motivated by his sense of duty toward the state, which was being menaced by the Christian agitation and departure from certain loyalties to the nation.

It may help us to see what Hodges fails to see if we look at what he himself says some pages farther on (p. 154). And when we hear him say this, we have to wonder how he can call Christianity "the most important movement in the history of man," seeing by and large that its effect upon the Occident as a whole differed little from its effect upon the world of the Roman Empire, which he describes as follows:

"There is plenty of other evidence, however, that the internal conversion of the Roman Empire to the Christian religion had effected no visible improvement in the common morals. The world was worse, rather than better. Out of its besetting temptations men fled to save their souls.

"They fled from the world, which in the first century was believed by the Christians to be doomed and liable to be destroyed by divine fire before the end of the year. . . . They fled also from the Church, which

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they accused of secularity and hypocrisy. Many of the monks were laymen who in deep disgust had forsaken the services and sacraments. They said their own prayers and sought God in their own way, asking no aid from the priests. They were men who had resolved never to go to church again."

And Hodges wonders why men of profound intellectual attainment and spiritual culture paid little attention to this movement along the rabble crowd, fanatical and already repulsive in its corruption and hypocrisy. The attention they did give it was inevitably to hold it up to derision and reprobation, mingled with pitying condescension. But as its furies spread they were in time brought to the resolve to put out by severe measures a pestilential mania of ignorance and frenzy that threatened the stable government of the world. Hodges heralds as the greatest event in history the smothering of true ancient light under the blanket of low superstition which brought no improvement, but on the contrary rendered life so evil that even from the portals of its own temples earnest men fled in disgust. Luther was to experience the same disgust and loathing of an evil thing as he descended the steps of a Christian temple at a later period. Perhaps the rise and spread of this religion was the most important event in world history. With the rise of critical thought, the advantage of a longer perspective and the privilege of untrammeled judgment, studious minds are calling into question whether the advent of Christianity was the most important event in history in the sense of an advance of the human spirit toward the light. Certainly any event which, along with much incidental good, has brought into manifestation a long train of evils, such as bigotry, slaughter, persecution, wars, divisions breeding hatred, mental confusion and delusion beyond measure and a host of ills never yet charted, must be considered important. But no one can longer claim that it is gloriously important. Millions of intelligent people in Oriental lands believe it was the most horrendous calamity in all history. On its evil side the wish might be that it were less important.

Hodges remarks that Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, read Origen and Plato. The two Gregories, Basil and others of the more intelligent leaders at that period had discernment enough to see what wells of truth the ancient heritage of knowledge contained, and knew what Origen was aiming to keep alive in Christianity. But

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it was becoming more hazardous to read and quote these Pagan sources of theology, and Jerome was severely taken to task for nibbling at the same table.

In view of the fact that Christianity has always claimed that it was the hordes of northern barbarians descending upon Greece and Rome that put out the light of learning and superinduced the Dark Ages, it is at least one item of interest to know that it was a Christian mob which burned the Alexandrian library, priceless beyond calculation; while the Goths, though destroying the temple of Diana at Ephesus, spared the library at Athens. Also, as cited by Higgins in The Anacalypsis (565), "St. Gregory is said by John of Salisbury to have burnt the imperial library of the Apollo." (From Forsyth's Travels, 134.)

It is indeed a fact looming large in relevance in Christian history that, as Guignebert says (p. 201), the influence of the Eastern, or original philosophical Christianity, upon the Christianity of the West "since the beginning of the Middle Ages has been very slight." This is evidently the result of the substitution of faith for the knowledge that philosophy supplies. Guignebert gives us an item of data here that speaks most significantly on this point. He says that out of the five hundred years from the death of Constantine to the end of the dispute regarding the images, i.e., from 337 to 843, two hundred and forty-eight of them, or nearly half of that period, were spent in open and avowed schism between the Eastern churches and Rome.

We find Guignebert testifying authentically to the broad claim here made that philosophy was discredited and pushed out, displaced by ignorant faith. Speaking of conditions in the fifth century, he says that the intelligence quotient of both priests and laity had fallen to so low a point that an uncouth compromise could be made between Church dogmas and "Teutonic superstitions." Since neither dogma nor Norse mythology was understood in its true occult sense, it was possible to join them in a common handling without too obvious discrepancy. F. S. C. Northrop, in his recent fine work, The Meeting of East and West, calls the modern practice in Protestantism of repeating set phrases without knowing their real meaning "idolatry and hocus-pocus."

Here again is common unintelligence drowning out all capable intellectual perception, and thereby reducing religion to simple faith, which, however, always will cling tenaciously to the traditional customs of the past. What Guignebert calls Teutonic superstitions, however, are to be truly recognized as ancient Norse mythological forms and usages, eso-

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terically understood doubtless by the inner circle of the hierophants, but long ago gone meaningless among the common people.

What "simple faith" did to Christianity as early as the sixth century is again ably portrayed by Guignebert. It brought the religion down exactly to the level of those Pagan practices from which in horror the early Fathers had labored to rescue their people. He writes (p. 216):

"By a strange turn of fortune Christianity now tends to become actually nothing more than a collection of legends and sacra . . . and consequently to resemble that ancient Olympian Paganism whose poverty of dogma and morals, lack of deep capacity and childish ceremoniousness it had formerly inveighed against so bitterly. This was the foundation and not the completed Patristic Christian tradition, upon which the popular religion practiced in the Middle Ages was reared. In the sixteenth century the Reformation will try to uproot it, and will only partially succeed."

The gist of this really momentous passage is that whenever a religious movement surrenders itself to the influence of common standards of the masses, it sinks at once to the level on which an unintelligent herd tendency to follow custom in complete blindness and automatism rules all practice. But again correction of the historian's imperfect opinions must be introduced for the sake of truth. Olympian Paganism was not in poverty of either dogma or morals, did not lack deep capacity and was not lost in childish ceremoniousness, as he asserts. When we at last rise to the height of ability to comprehend the subtleties of the ancient legendary mythology, we shall know that these apparent puerilities of the great Greek race were the outward vestures of profound verities.

In support of this assertion we have the declaration of no less a scholar than Sir Gilbert Murray that he begins to feel that the great works of the ancient Greek imagination are penetrated habitually by religious conceptions and postulates which literary savants like himself have not observed or understood. And this more discerning scholarship, he adds, while harder, rarer and less popular, is perhaps the most permanently valuable work, and certainly needs to be defended at this juncture of history. The effort to do just this is the basic warrant and "apology" for this volume.

Murray gives further powerful support to the claims here adduced, when he says that the whole noble effort of the Greeks to enlighten the barbarian nations after Alexander's conquest failed. This must be noted as one more failure of culture when esoteric wisdom attempted to reach and uplift the servile masses. The great Platonic philosophy

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failed; the Pythagorean failed; the Mysteries failed; the Orphic and Hermetic philosophies failed; the great Neoplatonic effort failed; Alexandrian eclecticism and syncretism failed; Mithraism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Therapeutism, Essenism, all failed; failed, that is, to reach beyond the ranks of the limited aristocracy and to precipitate lasting beneficial effects upon the stolid masses. Philosophy of course never fails; it is human appreciative and perceptive capacity that fails philosophy. And in the same way and to the same extent Christianity failed, even when it was given some chance of success by its incorporation of the Hellenic systems of wisdom teaching through the Epistles of Paul and the "Johannine" writings. It failed as culture always must fail when it casts pearls indiscriminately to the untamed appetites of the Beast. What is most notable in all this is that Christianity is the ebullition and ferment that came like froth to the surface when deeper knowledge had vanished.

We see one other disastrous outcome of the preachment of simple but uncritical and unintelligent faith to the common people in a result pictured by Guignebert (p. 221):

"They are drawn to the conviction that the Lamb itself is the occupant of the altar during the Mass, and that the consumption of the bread and wine constitutes a genuine sacrifice. Christ is sacrificed anew at every Mass, as he was upon the Mount of Calvary."

This throws on the historic screen the devastating mental effects of the attempt to impress simple folk with the realistic sense of what should clearly be told is drama and nothing more. But the citation is worth its space, if only because it prompts the observation anent its last sentence that if every reenactment of the Mass really crucifies a living being, the Christ, as an existing conscious entity, all over again, one surely is warranted in asking the Christians why in the name of mercy and humanity they do not put an end to this melancholy act of sadistic gruesomeness. Christians surely claim that Jesus is still a living personality, and hears prayers and suffers crucifixion. The Mass crucifies him again every time. What kind of a religion is it that knowingly goes on perpetually murdering its Redeemer over and over again? Might not psychology find that there is some true basis for the surmise that this repeated killing of the Christ has so blunted Christian hearts that they found it easy and emotionally stimulating to kill their dissenting fellowmen by the thousands at a later time?

But where could there be found a more direct and powerful con-

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demnation of simple faith as against knowledge than in the statement from Erigena's De Divisione Naturae, a work developing again the Neoplatonic system? There the outright assertion is made that "Christian faith is an obstacle to the progress of knowledge." If Medieval European history does not fully prove the correctness of this declaration of the Platonic Christian reformer, proof would indeed be hard to find. But it is difficult to perceive the almost stunning paradoxical truth of this remark by Erigena unless one has had the background of Neoplatonic wisdom with its splendid illumination of the soul, to silhouette vividly against its light the feeble consolations of sheer pious faith.

Guignebert comments on the deadening force of those pronounced dogmas of the ecclesiastics which the blind and subservient faith of the laity enabled authority to impose on the Church. Without knowledge to divine or to understand an elevated import in the doctrines or ordinances, worship degenerated to a meaningless automatism of habit. Religion went into dead formalism. For to act without meaning is close to the last stage of human irrationality and inanity. And with intelligence completely reduced to a nullity under the power of faith, there was neither chance nor room for the free spirit, which had been the dynamo of driving power at the inception of the movement, to exert its active and purifying influences. In fact, once a code of dogmas had become crystallized in the organization and been deified by authority, the activations of a free spirit became a menace to settled orthodoxy. And when spurts and sallies of such free inquiry were made in any century, they were forthwith and summarily beaten to earth.

All too diaphanous is the unsoundness of a religion which can so reduce the normal sense and balance of human beings, not all of whom can always be rated as doltish simpletons, as to drag them to the sorry pass of forgetting their divine dignity and accepting their categorization as worms in the sight of Deity. Some egregious stultification of the sense of normal human worth must be superinduced upon average minds before so unworthy a self-humiliation can be inflicted. A system of "faith" that ends by abasing the natural human being to the level of the worm has little on which to ground its claim to being the highest religion in the world. And this is the religion that has most loudly asserted its claim that it more than any other has exalted the dignity, the divine worth, of the individual.

Again let truth have its hearing on another aspect of this theme. Here is the Church whose arrogant boast it is that it tore religion out

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of the hands of the few cold-hearted aristocrats of intellect and gave it to the mean and lowly, to their infinite benefit. Yet Guignebert paints a picture of the revulsion of the "common people" against this same Church in the later period in Europe. He is speaking of the groups that again and again voiced their disapproval of the dead dogmatism of the Church, and asked for the privilege of giving free vent to the strivings and afflations of the spirit in the individual life, unrestricted by ecclesiastical dogmas (p. 290):

"Down below the agitation of these people . . . hostility to the established Church was evidently strong. Not only did these groups no longer believe that she was fulfilling her divine mission, but they saw in her the main obstacle to the advent of that era of happiness to which they looked forward."

Even those who gave religion to the poor and simple will find that these beneficiaries will not forever receive with complete docility a gift that leaves them hungry and unnourished. Even the worm will turn. And eventually the divine principle in all mortals, no matter how overlaid and stifled by ignorance, will not everlastingly accept without rebellion the characterization of infinite meanness. Now and again among the "common people" is born an uncommon spirit, a soul that rises despite obstacles to an understanding and a vision, and who may open the eyes of his lowly fellows to the poison of their imposed diet. The poor can at times even bite and mangle the hand that holds forth the spiritual diet of "worms." In 1260 there arose in Germany, Holland, Hungary, Flanders, all eastern France, following their first uprising in Italy, an order calling themselves Flagellantes or Penitentes. They marched in bands through the towns and villages of these countries chanting hymns and lashing each other for the space of thirty-three and a half days, as they regarded this as the period of time necessary to effect the purification of their souls. On their way, says Guignebert, they massacred Jews and displayed their feelings toward the clergy by robbing the Church of its possessions and abusing the possessors. "Wild fanatics like Tauchelm in the Netherlands . . . or Eon de Loudeac, who gave himself out to be the Son of God, are by no means rare."

The free human spirit finds or takes many strange ways of manifesting its independence when it is too long and too rigidly held in conformity to express forms and formulas. Tyrants have often learned this lesson when it was too late. The Christian Church, which arose as an outburst of the free, but unintelligent expression of the feelings

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of lowly people, eventually became the crystallization of such a rigorous despotism in the kingdom of thought that its own devotees could no longer brook in silent submission its ecclesiastical thraldom, and so it was rent violently asunder in the sixteenth century. Good simple folk lack the capability of discerning recondite aspects of truth and the abstractions of philosophical understanding. But they are not to the same degree incapable of sensing gross falsities, which the course of events has a way of bringing to open sight after a time. Time often teaches what brain alone can not discern. The people can at times be wisely led to take up arms against humbug and dishonesty.

Still to be examined on the theme of faith versus knowledge is the patent truth that life and evolution inexorably demand of the individual, as a sine qua non for his advancement to the goal of glory, something more than sheer faith. As Paul showed, that something is first goodness, or virtue, and then the prime requisite, knowledge. Nature would be unjust if she dispensed without discrimination her blessings equally to those who have through toil and suffering met her terms of capability and to those who have not so earned them. The ineluctable truth is that man will not receive any grade or quality of benison until he has evolved the ability to command it. In this sense life bestows nothing gratuitously. All her benefits are freely held forth to all; but only he who knows how can take them. This is the fundamental meaning of the word "king." Seen in its German etymology, he is the one who "can." Part of Nietzsche's abhorrence to Christianity was engendered by his observation of the working of one of the basic theological dogmas of the religion,--its emphasis on a practically unlimited largesse of blessing from God on no more substantial ground of merit than simple "belief." Such an unmeasured generosity of Deity introduced chaos into the philosopher's ordered world, where precise law rules. Effects must stand in exact relation to adequate causes; and the Christian doctrines of the forgiveness of sins, the vicarious atonement and the inexhaustible reservoirs of God's infinite mercy and grace, dismantled the philosopher's conception of cosmos. If the philosopher finds in his own life that salvation from life's ills is only won by dint of his keen search and capture of truth and his obedience to natural law, he is loath to accredit a system which claims that a few hours of maudlin emotionalism will win eternal bliss.

A pertinent reflection of Milman is most apropos here (p. 29):

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"When man becomes more acquainted with his own nature, the less he is satisfied with deities cast in his own mold." This is indeed a trenchant deduction; and we need look little farther for an elucidation of the hold of anthropomorphic theory upon the masses. Educated men become more realistically aware of the subtleties and shallowness of their own motivations, as well as of their sincerities. But the lower masses remain naive and unsuspecting, credulous and susceptible. The deeper thinker will accept no God in his own image, however magnified to cosmic stature. The thinker has won his way to freedom from ready credulity; the uncritical man has not, but must accept what revered authority hands out to him.

Milman plunges without hesitation into the tremendous question under discussion in a passage (on page 32) of his great History of Christianity. It is a notable statement and commands our attention, since it badly needs competent answer:

"Philosophy, as a substitute for religion, was still more manifestly deficient. For in the first place it was unable, or condescended not, to reach the body of the people, whom the progress of civilization was slowly bringing up toward the common level; and where it found or sought proselytes it spoke without authority, and distracted with the multitude of its conflicting sects the patient but bewildered inquirer. Philosophy maintained the aristocratic tone, which, while it declared to a few elect spirits alone, it was possible to communicate the highest secrets of knowledge, more particularly the mysteries of the great Supreme Being, proclaimed it vain and unwise to attempt to elevate the many to such exalted speculations."

Here is the old cry: philosophy failed the masses. It ministered only to the needs of the aristocratic few. But it is time the weak points of this stricture on philosophy be examined. To call philosophy a substitute for religion is, to begin with, a false premise. Philosophy can be called a substitute for religion only in the wholly admissible sense in which it can be said that maturity is a substitute for childish immaturity, or a good meal is a substitute for an empty stomach, or education a substitute for ignorance. Milman's use of the term "substitute" is in the sense that religion is an adequate and perfect element, while philosophy as an alternative is an impliedly inferior replacement. In the proper sense philosophy substitutes vaster understanding for religion's groping faith, and the sooner the substitution in this sense is made, the better. As Miss Langer has said, philosophy is that upper realm of vision and knowledge in which the activations of religion are

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absorbed and finally dissipated, like smoke and steam in the pure upper air.

It is not a deficiency or defect of abstruse speculation and reflective thinking that they are not readily communicable to the mass level of mind. It is their nature, yes, even their utility and their beneficence that they can not be. It is time that just rebuke be administered the criticism thrown eternally at esotericism and intellectual aristocracy for their "deficiency" in not being something which by their nature and description they have no right to be asked to be.

A syllogism might more pointedly bring out the illogicality of the argument which is used to prove the "deficiency" of philosophy. The first or major premise would be: (a) Esoteric philosophy is abstruse and highly recondite. The second or minor premise would be: (b) The masses are incapable of grasping abstruse and recondite philosophy. The conclusion would be: (c) Therefore esoteric philosophy is defective. This is the unsound upshot of all this diatribe of Christian writers against ancient esotericism: it makes the stupidity of the ignorant the criterion of the good of esotericism. The masses are dumb and recusant to every higher advance or enlightenment, until higher genius discovers and demonstrates it. One does not call higher mathematics defective for being beyond the reach of the common mind. It is time we stop belaboring esotericism for not being something other than what it by nature is.

Then when the question arises as to supplying the needs of the lower ranks of society, let wisdom guide the discussion into proper channels. Failing that guidance history has taken hold of the situation and fed the "vulgar" multitude on religion, with philosophy only vaguely hovering in the background in the guise of a little known theology.

The tragedy of this actual working out of the problem is, as has been stated, that the multitude has never been fed on truth simplified, to be grasped by that level of capability, but truth turned into utter falsity, through the mistaking the images of truth for its actual substance. When spiritual complexities have been dramatized in fable, allegory and myth in order to stimulate the imagination through concrete picturizations, the sad outcome has been that, in the incredible density of their minds, the people fail to see the principle depicted and take the dramatization for the truth itself.

Of course philosophy condescends not to reach the body of the people. For the people have invariably treated it as did the dogs and swine of the Biblical metaphor; they snap at it and turn and rend it,

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trampling it in their filth. Christian insistence that philosophy failed because it did not transfigure the common mass of people is a most damning indictment of its own defective insight into the authentic and realistic conditions that are basic for high human culture.

And what is more: when the actuality of history is studied without bias, and the conspicuous consequences of the Christian effort to cast arcane philosophy to the hoi polloi over twenty centuries are fully tabulated, it is seen that their allegedly noble attempt to take the mysteries of truth to the masses has eventuated in the unparalleled darkening of the human mind, the loss of all true sense of the arcane books of wisdom, the hallucination of the millions, the dupery of all ecclesiastical rulership, and the befouling of history with the most frightful inhumanity of man to man in world annals.

In the same strain runs the exceptionally frank tribute to the high quality of the esoteric philosophy taught at Alexandria and its later degeneration. Kershner says that it had become less philosophical, "more and more spiritualistic and fanatical," until it was finally overwhelmed by the Mohammedan sweep in the seventh century. "Paganism and the old Greek culture had flared up in one final magnificent expression in the teachings of Plotinus and his Neo-Platonist companions." Then, referring to Plotinus, he writes (op. cit., pp. 105-7):

"His philosophy was intended for intellectual highbrows only. . . . Like most of the Hellenes he appears to have despised Christianity, looking upon it as a vulgar superstition fit only for slaves and the lower classes of workmen. Naturally enough the philosophy of Plotinus appealed to the higher classes, especially at the Roman court, and during the latter part of the third century it loomed up as a most formidable rival of the Christian teaching.

"It possessed attractive features for the upper class intellectuals, but it had no word for the down-trodden masses of the Empire, and therefore failed in the competition."

Then follow statements that are too singular to be missed:

"Neo-Platonism allied itself with the old Pagan cults in a last effort to prevent the inevitable. . . . But the new faith had the power to deal with facts as they are, while the other cults lived only in a world of dreams. The gray era of the Middle Ages was at hand."

Kershner is here graphically depicting the most tragic turn of events in world history and treats it as a turn toward the light! That the magnificent enlightenment glowing on every page of the great Neo-

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platonic system was doomed to "inevitable" extinction under the thickening pall of mental incapacity expressing itself in the new Christian movement should be termed by a man posing as a scholarly exponent of religion as a "world of dreams" and set over in disparaging contrast to "things as they are," reveals pitiably the incomprehension of the Christian mind about true history. Had the philosophy of Plotinus conquered instead of Christianity, there would not have been at hand "the gray Middle Ages." One of the "dreams" out of his philosophy Plotinus gave to Christianity itself, the "dream" of the Trinity. We are indebted to Lecky for a view of some at least of the "facts as they are" which it pleased Christian ministers to deal out to their gullible followers. Says he in Vol. II of his History of European Morals (p. 223):

"It was the custom then, as it is the custom now, for Catholic priests to strain the imaginations of young children by ghastly pictures of future misery, to imprint upon the virgin mind atrocious images which they hoped, not unreasonably, might prove indelible."

He speaks of incredible, grotesque, horrible visions reportedly seen by Christian monks of the pagans suffering torture in hell, with literal fire and all the lurid realism. They fed to children the stories of demons punishing the wicked and pictured the impending destruction of the world.

"Mr. Hallam, The Middle Ages, Ch. IX, Part I, speaking of the legends of the miracles of saints, says: 'It must not be supposed that these absurdities were produced as well as nourished by ignorance. In most cases they were the work of deliberate imposture. Every cathedral or monastery had its tutelar saint, and every saint his legend, fabricated in order to enrich the churches under his protection, by exaggerating his virtues, his miracles and consequently his power of serving those who paid liberally for his patronage.' No impartial person can doubt its essential truth."

"The religious history of several centuries is little more than a history of the rapacity of priests and of the credulity of laymen."

"But legends of this kind . . . must not blind us to the fact that the period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . A crowd of superstitions, attributed to infallible wisdom, barred the path of knowledge, and the charge of magic or the charge of heresy crushed every bold inquiry in the sphere of physical nature or of opinions . . . true inquiry had been cursed by the Church. A blind unquestioning credulity was inculcated as the first of duties, and the habit of doubt, the impartiality of a suspended judgment, the desire to hear both sides of a disputed question, and to emancipate the judgment from unreasoning prejudice, were all in consequence con-

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demned. The belief in the guilt of error and doubt became universal, and that belief may be confidently pronounced to be the most pernicious superstition that has ever been accredited among mankind. . . . Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science and classical freethought and industrial independence broke the scepter of the Church did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.

"The monasteries diffused, wherever their influence extended, habits of credulity and intolerance that are the most deadly poisons to the human mind."

"It is difficult to look upon Catholicism in any other light than as the most deadly enemy of the scientific spirit. . . ."

This incredible recital could go on for a hundred pages; it is thrown in here only to present actually what the Christian "power to deal with facts as they are" brought forth.

It would seem unnecessary to heap up additional confirmation of the conclusion that a religion of faith will stifle reason and reduce the believer to a bondage under his emotional states; but we have before us further testimony to this fell force in the case of a man as intelligent as the canonized Augustine. When a leader of his potential capability surrenders his mind to mystical forces, one can be certain that the mass of common people will be surer victims of the same tendency. Says Joseph Wheless in his Forgery in Christianity (p. xvii):

"The proudest boast today of the Church for its ex-Pagan Saint Augustine is that : 'as soon as a contradiction [between his philosophy and his religious doctrine] arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to religion, reason to faith.' (Cath. Ency. ii, 86.) So this great ex-Pagan Saint of the Church surrenders his reason to faith and avers: 'I would not believe the Gospels to be true, unless the authority of the Catholic Church constrained me.'" (Aug., De Genesi.)

Faith had done its baleful work all too well. We can see Plotinus' justification for appearing to be neglectful of the ignorant in a passage from Guthrie's translation of the works of Plotinus (p. 18):

"Not a single word or similarity of expression in the Enneads betrays any acquaintance with the Christian formulations, nor does Plotinus anywhere betray that his doctrines had arisen in opposition to or imitation of Christianity; he utterly ignores it. And the reason of this is plain: for the Christian usually belonged to the lowest and most unphilosophical classes with a few exceptions; and it seems almost amusing to think of a man so deeply read in philosophy as Plotinus or Ammonius Saccas were, should borrow all their best doctrines from unphilosophical sources."

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He asks how so "barren a source could finish the acknowledged rich results of Neo-Platonism."

In his Christianity Past and Present (p. 476) Guignebert sets forth the justification which the Church has advanced for its practice of feeding the multitude on the porridge of simple faith and materialized conceptions:

"The pretext by which the worst practices can always justify themselves, i.e., that they edify those who take their religion simply and who would never become attached to it if it were not brought down to their level; God will always be the gainer as far as their intention goes, at any rate."

The skulduggery of this subterfuge can not be expounded in a paragraph. But in quite succinct form let it be said that God can gain nothing from anything that does not edify and elevate man; for the only way that man can contribute to the glory of God is by the increase of his own portion of deity, the spark of divine mind implanted within the core of his own nature. If that is not made to shine brighter, God is not the gainer. The Church that holds its millions to a low level of intellectual development and makes no effort to cultivate a truly higher vision is depriving God of his only chance to be glorified through man.

The Church received its exalted and central doctrine (at least the one it fought over with tigerish fury for two centuries) of the Trinity from Plotinus. But the consequences of its failure to follow his philosophy is that not in eighteen centuries has it ever had the true exposition or understanding of that doctrine. Its explicit and comprehensible meaning is not known to anybody in the Church to this day. But at least one high churchman in the modern day has testified that his own most luminous comprehension of Christian theology has come from his extraordinary interest in the philosophy of this same Plotinus. This is Dean Ralph W. Inge, long primate of Westminster. His two fine volumes on the philosophy of Plotinus amply testify to this.

Paganism had itself run the gamut of bitter experience in having endeavored as best it could to impart the myths and allegories, the symbols and emblems of supernal verities, to the populace. Time and again the outer types of representation had become agglutinized in the general mind as realities in themselves. The ignorant are ever ready to take the shadow for the substance. The result is always that the multitude turn these precious truths into the agencies of hallucination.

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It is going to demand a whole new orientation of method in education to hit finally upon the right course to be pursued, so that untutored minds can be furnished with forms that really simplify truth without transmogrifying it into blank errors. It will always require considerable deftness in elucidation. But the proper procedure will always have to be based on a grounding of instruction on nature-forms. The ancient Egyptian science of analogical paralogism, or nature symbolism, must be revived and made the cornerstone of a new semantic pedagogy. Then a skill must be developed, the technique being happily already envisaged, to effect the transfer of meaning and reference from the nature symbol over to the conscious domain where mystical and spiritual realizations are born. But the one sane method will have to be the representation of supernal truth over the image and pattern of natural truth.

In regard to the excessive credulity engendered among the Christians by the preachment of faith and the condemnation of philosophy Lecky tells us (op. cit., I, 384) that

"Lucian declares that every cunning juggler could make his fortune by going over to the Christians and preying upon their simplicity. Celsus describes the Christian jugglers performing their tricks among the young and credulous. The most decisive evidence we possess, however, is a law of Ulpian directed, it is thought, against the Christians, which condemns those 'who use incantations or imprecations, or (to employ the common word of imposters) exorcisms' . . . that when the Laodicean Council in the fourth century forbade any one to exorcise, except those who were duly authorized by the Bishop, these miracles speedily declined. . . ."

The history of the Church would supply a thousand illustrations of the follies of wild belief and superstitious practice that are bound to take form and find expression when people are fed on faith and their minds left to starve for rational nourishment. A full recounting of the evils of a faith religion would cover the history of a hundred great and lesser movements of religious ferment in the Western world down to the present.

Religion in general has been the horrifying story of one rampant delusion after another. Most dismal of all is the survey of the multitudinous aberrations of sound human mentality venting their expression without end in the pale of orthodox Christianity itself. Rebound from disgust and disillusionment met with in one outburst has often precipitated unintelligence over into another equally wretched at the

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other extreme. Thus the student of religious history passes over the endless train of cult movements, every one of which sprang from the failure of true philosophical insight at some point of its formulation. And over all hovers the dank and clammy atmosphere of the mass persuasion that any movement inspired by a sodden heavy pietism is therewith sanctified and must command holy respect. When men assemble to pray, let the secular world keep silence. And the story of how slyly men garbed in black have utilized the reverence for pietism toward the attainment of their own very secular ends is one that also has never been written.

The Christian charge that the Pagan philosophers cared nothing for the mental upliftment of the masses is controverted by the evidence. Who more than Socrates strove to take his logic to men on the street corners of the world? Printing was not at hand to make universal dissemination possible. But Plato formed his school, as did Pythagoras before him, as centers of light to all who could come to study. Paganism had schools whose instruction is still the guiding light of human thought. Christianity closed them, and put out their light. Let there be an end of the base slander that Paganism cared nothing for the people. The power that closed these centers of radiation of intellectual light later, of course, established its own schools. But the instruction imparted therein aimed straight at the extinguishing of the light that has been the primal mind dynamo of the human race.

There was never a time when the priceless boon of esoteric truth was withheld knowingly from any who could furnish the requisite credentials; and these were fixed by nature and not accorded by the teachers. The philosophers simply used the discretion of intelligence in recognizing the inevitable limitations of the recipients, and in adapting methods of instruction to the capabilities of the learners. The leading and more intelligent Christians themselves strove to keep higher knowledge from its lowest ranks, until all caution and prudence were swept away by the inrush of the masses seeking salvation on terms falsely proclaimed as quite too facile.

The fall of culture from high to base levels is always marked by the shift from philosophy to religion and in religion from knowledge to faith.

All this can be seen in clearer perspective by reflection upon a master statement by Sheldon in his Psychology and the Promethean Will (p. 26).

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"One of the first and most vital concerns of man is the maintenance of integration between feeling and intellect. It is a need fully as imperative as the need of food, and to meet this need is the true psychological function of religion."

This is truth of supreme import. A religion that fails to nourish the thinking soul of man fails even as a religion, much more as a philosophy. Calamity follows in the wake of failure to apply this truth. Its mighty sanity has been flouted by the religion that abandoned, nay, scorned and berated the intellect and worked on feeling alone. But that religion was, for its own salvation, forced to take up again and again the intellectual systems of the very Paganism it charges with being a mental aristocracy and a failure to meet human needs. How idiotically its own history confutes its monotonous claims!

What a fresh breeze of sanity blows through the utterance of Rabelais who (Gargantua, I, 52) puts the gist of all our long exposition in the pith of a single sentence:

"The greatest dream of the world was to regulate itself by the sound of a church bell and not by the dictates of common sense and intelligence."

The Christian "faith" is the paramount demonstration in all the world's life that to try to dominate humankind by a religion divorced from philosophy is to take the path leading straight to wreckage. History records that fearful wreckage.

And again the irony of history grimaces tantalizingly and vengefully at the institution that tore its people away in hatred of philosophy and thus loosed upon them the whole Pandora's brood of superstitions, wild beliefs and pious addiction to supernatural expectations. For this monster Frankenstein has turned to master its creator. Or so says Guignebert (op. cit., p. 476):

"The official Church is dominated by the letter and by superstition; she has become incapable of holding her own effectively against them, and she no longer seems to believe that any attempt to do so is to her interest."

And so all the shining glory acclaimed to itself by the Christian religion for having gone out into the highways and by-ways of the world and given holy and comforting religion to the outcast and despised of men, is turned by the wand of the ugly fairy in the tale of history into the ignominy of having debauched a world with ignorance and folly.