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CHAPTER XII.

THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE.

The Growing Capacity.

THE fact of a human religious instinct is established beyond dispute, and needs no extended proof in this discussion. The desire to know, the social impulse, the sex instinct, and the intuition of a superior power are the four ineradicable elements of human nature. Religion is not a projection of anything into life. It is the conscious action of powers which have been creatively provided. The human spirit comes into existence with that distinct bent. It is a birth capacity and an inheritance vastly greater than we yet know. Religious teaching everywhere dependably assumes its existence. The whole problem consists in calling it out and giving it direction in the light of all knowledge. The outer correspondences of the world are the channels along which the inward capacity runs, to leap at last into the flame and afflatus of true devotion. The younger Booth of the Salvation Army expresses the deep

philosophy of that remarkable propaganda when he says, "The spark of the divine lies hidden and smoldering in the soul of the wastrel." And it is also of profound cosmic significance that the man "down and out" is captured with kettle-drum and fife. Thrown under and despoiled, he yet has an ear for that appeal. When he follows it down the street he does not go far, but he is on his way out. One of the curses of religion is the aristocracy of its methods.

Let it be understood that the foundations of character are laid in the reactions of the human spirit with an intelligent, natural world. And that excludes nothing. All experiences have the builder's stamp. They are not crass sensations. Mysteriously, in all sounds and voices and colors and days and seasons the divine is enmeshed. The revealing process starts in infancy and follows the growing intellect. Some materialization all the time leads the way. The self-revelation of God is not a down-letting-it is an uplifting. God is not a prince on a raised platform. God is in everything, always a satisfying response to the human capacity. The idea of the divine, even among advanced peoples, is a growing composite.

A star, to a child, is a bright speck in the sky.

The child may know more about the stars as it grows. The stars are the revealing potentials— rich with bottomless truth. The limitations of the starting point, with a child, are negligible, if it is a grower. What God is to us we know. That knowledge is real, practical, livable. What God is—all in all—is absolutely inscrutable.

The Primitive Man.

Self-evidently the primitive-minded man could only have primitive notions about anything. The student of the early records of the race must take large account of childish fears and superstitions. The low man, who is a savage, is disturbed by strange emotions-mental vagaries, dreams, ghosts, invisible enemies, spirits of ancestors, storms, earthquakes, cyclones, scourges of pestilent diseases; for he believes these have in them a threat to destroy him. He has also aspirations and yearnings and outreachings which he does not understand. He has a vague feeling of dependence on a superior power which perplexes and distresses him. Strange noises startle him; he creates another world out of dreamland; he hangs up a charm in his hut; he carves an image on the rocks; he seeks an open place in the woods and bows down

when the sun rises-that is, he comes out a worshiper. A mole may take to the ground and a fish to the sea; but man moves out toward the mystery which surrounds him.

He has a spontaneous, an unreflecting grip on a somewhat in nature like himself. His food comes from the soil. Water quenches his thirst. The seasons come and go with regularity, and to his advantage. He learns to know certain things as the bird knows the nesting time and the time of migration north or south. The violent natural forces may awaken in him reverence or terror; and he may cry out, as the animals cry in fright or pain; but above the animal a dim sense of the divine possesses him. Unconsciously the deeps of his inmost being answer to the deeps of the world of nature, and the truth of the invisible breaks in on him little by little. He can not extricate himself. He can not get above or below things. He must persist in things and meet the facts of experience. He takes the substance and the form together, in an unreflecting way. His formal reason is not in action. His spirit nature responds to a spirit world. The kinship is generic. His birthright inheritances determine for him a human destination and a deathless interest in

the invisible world. All the elements of experience which beat down on him from without are wrought into a definite alignment of tendencies in harmony with his nature, just as the nutritive substances which reach his body are assimilated in the building of the physical organism. The savage does not know how he is related to either the pleasures or the distresses of his life, and he is therefore likely to be mastered more by his fears than his confidences. If the religious impulsions were founded originally in fear, they are none the less legitimate and rational. A baby's fright at a strange noise is not a weakness, and it is not irrational. When the child mind among the races remains a worshiper-when that mind, through knowledge, emerges into culture and civilization, and the impulse to worship yet remains-the fact itself is proof positive of the validity of religious ideas.

The Universe Appears.

We are not able to see any justifiable disappointment in religion as an evolution. If what the world now knows of God and duty has its rootings in the soil of the beginnings of the human life, do we not have in that a secure thought basis for religion? Is it not a very sturdy ground

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