WHAT IS RELIGION?

rrHE name of Professor Bousset is familiar to all readers of Biblical criticism. All the critics quote him—from Professor Jiilicher to Professor Sanday—to confirm or to refute. Like Professor Harnack, his books are well known in England, for he writes with a charm which the technicalities of his subject cannot impair, and he does not forget that if the science of literary and historical criticism is for the few, religion is still for the many. His new book, " What is Religion?" (T. Fisher Tinwin, 5s. net), cannot but remind the reader of Harnack's "What is Christianity ? " Indeed, the book might not improperly have appeared under Harnack's celebrated title, though it necessarily covers a considerably wider ground. It is not, of course, a history of religion. In the space of one small volume that would be impossible. Rather it is a brilliant historical essay about religion informed and inspired by a single idea : " Not only in Christianity is the highest point reached, but in it all former lines of religious thought appear to converge." Until lately almost all the official advocates of Christianity argued its truth from its isolation. In Judaism alone was Christianity allowed to find affinity. Analogous traits in other religions were laboriously explained away. They were mere verbal coinci- dences or stray sparks from the Christian fire, according to the date of their origin. The workings of the Holy Spirit were to be sought for by Christians only in the Hebrew Scriptures until the year of our Lord, and after that only within the precincts of Christendom. In fact, the shadow of Jehovah obscured the face of the one God who, though a ruler over all from the beginning, had still His dwelling at Jerusalem. Such an evidence to Christianity was destined to destruction. Learning and sympathy have utterly destroyed it. Yet out of its ashes has arisen a far stronger proof. The learned men have wrested one sword at least from the hand of the sceptic, and have put it into the armoury of the Church. From every age and from every country, out of every civilisation and every stronghold of thought, Professor Bousset marshals his witnesses to Christ, the safety of Whose kingdom can never, he believes, depend upon its circum- scription, but is broad based within the heart of man upon a consensus of aspiration, a common hunger, and a common satisfaction.

He draws a picture which even those who find fault with his method must admit to be grandly conceived. He does not write for every imaginable reader. To those who hold that religion is " merely fantasy created by man's urgent impulse, and an illusion," he has in his present work nothing to say. The audience whom be desires must come from among such as "feel within them- selves at least a questioning and a seeking after this side

of life." It is of them he demands a judgment. Of them he would know whether he can make good his point, whether he may not arrive legitimately at this conclu- sion : " That the whole religious life of man and his history springs from the work and action of God by means of which He draws men individually from error to truth, from imper- fection to perfection, from egoism to fraternity, from the sensual to the moral, from the natural to the spiritual, and attracts them to Himself."

At the furthest point from Christianity, yet always on the road thither, Professor Bousset shows us the savage, whose religious notions are not easy for modern men to grasp, but which are docketed by the learned under the word "animism."

He has little sense of his own individuality, little perception of the difference between men and animals, little of the dis- tinction between animals and plants. He finds beasts among his ancestry. He is willing to believe that men are descended from trees, or that they sprang from the reeds in the liver. He is part of a great life, but he is not a materialist. The one thing which seems to him incredible is death. " When death comes to man the body decays, but—and the belief is universal—the soul never dies." Out of this certainty springs for the savage the worship of ancestors. Indeed, "there are investigators who see in this worship of the dead the origin of all religion." In honouring a common ancestor the family soon develops into the tribe. Admission into the tribe is admission into the community of blood. In the blood is the life. A victim is killed, and the whole clan drinks his blood, and wh )(aver desires to enter can do so only by drinking also. A sacrifice of blood is offered to the common ancestor or god of the tribe that the same blood may run in the veins of the worshipper and the worshipped. At this stage the highest law known to the individual is blood-revenge, and the permanent condition of tribal life is one of blood-feud. Yet even here we see some dawning sense of altruism, some stirring of desire for a relationship with a Power outside the visible world.

The idea of nationality means the death of savagely, but " the basis of national life is the basis of polytheism." The separate tribes and districts which unite to form one nation and one country bring their tribal deities with them. " While in the one case there is unity of national life, in the other there is plurality of gods." As the distinctions of tribes fade away the gods remain. The god of the conquering race becomes, perhaps, the god of war, the god of the conquered the god of shepherd and peasant life. Soon men find in the gods their ideals, and images begin to play an important part. The stage reached by religions may be estimated according to the form chosen to represent the godhead. The human form in its noblest manifestation illustrates the last stage of polytheism. Professor Bousset claims the art of Greece as a witness to the power of religion. " Freed from all earthly stain, raised above earthly sorrow, without flaw or blemish, magnificent types of strong, perfect manhood, noblest womanhood, and maidenhood, these gods stood before the Greek man and woman, who bowed down before them." Led by the Old Testament writers, the world has undervalued the spirituality to be found in polytheistic religions,—so Professor Bousset teaches us. And truly, accord- ing to his quotations, there are portions of the psalms of Egypt found in the " Book of the Dead " not unworthy of a place beside the psalms of Israel:— " Oh, Lord, Thy servant, cast him not away,

Plunged in the flood, stretch forth Thy hand.

The sin which I have committed, transform by Thy grace! The ill deeds I have done, let the winds carry away !"

Everywhere, writes Professor Bousset, " we are conscious of broken rays of a Divine nature which shine into the hearts of men ; broken rays certainly, but rays of Divine majesty and glory, of Divine goodness and charity." But polytheism was destined to fall. Between the eighth and the sixth centuries B.C. it seems as if the tree of the religious life of mankind sent forth new shoots at the same time in different places. The great prophets appeared in Israel. Perhaps at the same time, perhaps earlier, lived Zarathustra. " A religions move- ment began in Greece, the exponents of which were the great tragedians, later Socrates, and above all Plato." Buddha was doing his work in India, Confucius in China. All these men spoke to the world,—to man, and not to sections of men.

After this great period of efflorescence Professor Bousset once more subdivides his subject, which falls, roughly

speaking, into two parts,—the religions of the 'law as distinct from the religions of redemption. The one sought primarily to uphold the faltering steps of man by the galling support of the minutest discipline, the other to deliver his soul from the unending sorrows 'of the actual.

In this connexion Professor Bousset, with a boldness only his brilliance can justify, couples the names of Buddha and Plato.

At last our author comes to Christianity. What is its essential nature, what its probable future, he asks ? Professor Bousset casts aside with an almost barbarous roughness what he calls "the rubbish of tradition." Scholastic theology has not the remotest interest for him. Christianity is to be found in the teaching and in the personality of Christ. In Him, according to Professor Bousset, the religions of the law and of redemption meet. He delivered men from ceremonial. He dethroned the Scribes. He redeemed men from the terror of the world by assuring them that when man aspires to God the old passes away and a new life is begun, and by bringing them into relation with "a personal Being" whom He calls " Father," for " the Gospel expresses in unsurpassed fashion the idea that the nature of God is not that of a universal, impersonal existence." He trans.

formed the idea of judgment which strikes terror into the human conscience by changing the centre of moral gravity from action to motive, thus allowing a place for repentance. " He knew that as soon as the Divine Thou shalt' began to stream through the consciousness of man, earth-born man would oppose this voice, and then a mortal combat would arise.

He knew that in this conflict we should never reach the

goal appointed for us. And because He knew this Jesus revealed to His people a God of forgiveness, a God who

does not look to the performances but is content with the disposition that begets goodwill, and daily He forgives sin's. Here the Gospel of Jesus reaches its supreme height."

All this, he says, is not laid down in the Gospel as a doctrine, but it is concentrated in a portrait. " His figure [the figure of our Lord]," he goes on, "is the noblest and the most perfect that has been granted to humanity on its long journey from the lower stage to the higher. He is the goal of our existence, the leader of our life, to whom no other leader is comparable." Such is the

conclusion—the conclusion of one who has been accounted by timid spirits among the orthodox as a destructive critic—

to which Professor Bonnet's lifework has brought him, to, as he tells us, his "joyful astonishment." An extraordinary note of religious happiness and security sounds through the book. He speaks in the tones of the man who knows he has ventured all, and believes he has lost nothing.

Let us add for ourselves the question : " Where could we find stronger external support for faith in the divinity of Christ than in a line of argument such as that we have been following ? " It is an argument which makes no miraculous claims, and is based, as it were, on the earth, yet it points directly to a divine nature, a divine mission, and a divine origin.