The Evolution of Religion: The Gifford Lectures

THE CONTRAST OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE RELIGION.

The two Types of Religion and their Union in Christianity — Goethe’s View of the Opposition — Matthew Arnolds Contrast of Hellenism and Hebraism — Re-appearance of the Opposition in Modern Life — Pope’s Expression of Pantheism, and the Objections brought against it — Pure Monotheism and the Objections brought against it.

IN my lectures during last session, I endeavoured to set before you a view of religion as one of the three great factors or elements in our conscious life, which, therefore, like all the other elements or factors, is subjected to a continuous process of development, and only in that process gradually comes to manifest its real meaning and purport. I tried to show that, just as a consciousness of the object and the subject, of the world without and the self within, must be supposed to exist in all rational beings, so in all rational beings there is at least a dawning consciousness of the unity presuppposed in this difference, of the universal which originates and transcends this elementary distinction of our life. As truly as it is part of our nature to look outwards and fill our life with objective interests, as truly as it is part of our nature to look inwards — to return upon ourselves and to become conscious of an inner life of our own in which we are separated from all others — so it is part of our nature, an immanent necessity of our rational being, to look upwards, and to regard our whole life, inner and outer, as based upon and circumscribed by a Power, in whom we and all things live and move and have our being. Hence the consciousness of God is as near to us, as necessary to us, as the consciousness of the world or of the self; nay, in a sense, it has a higher necessity than either, and we are nearer to God than to ourselves: for the consciousness of self rests upon the idea of God, as at once its first presupposition and its last end and goal. All our life is a progress through the world and through ourselves to the God from whom we come, in whom we are, to whom we tend.