The Necessity of Religion

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The Personal idea of God or the Impersonal, the Infinite, Moral Law,

or the Ideal Man--these all have to come under the definition of

religion. And when religions have become thus broadened, their power

for good will have increased a hundredfold. Religions, having

tremendous power in them, have often done more injury to the world

than good, simply on account of their narrowness and limitations.

 

Even at the present time we find many sects and societies, with

almost the same ideas, fighting each other, because one does not want

to set forth those ideas in precisely the same way as another.

Therefore, religions will have to broaden. Religious ideas will have

to become universal, vast, and infinite; and then alone we shall have

the fullest play of religion, for the power of religion has only just

begun to manifest in the world. It is sometimes said that religions

are dying out, that spiritual ideas are dying out of the world. To me

it seems that they have just begun to grow. The power of religion,

broadened and purified, is going to penetrate every part of human

life. So long as religion was in the hands of a chosen few or of a

body of priests, it was in temples, churches, books, dogmas,

ceremonials, forms, and rituals. But when we come to the real,

spiritual, universal concept, then, and then alone, religion will

become real and living; it will come into our very nature, live in

our every movement, penetrate every pore of our society, and be

infinitely more a power for good than it has ever been before.

 

What is needed is a fellow-feeling between the different types of

religion, seeing that they all stand or fall together, a fellow-

feeling which springs from mutual esteem and mutual respect, and not

the condescending, patronising, niggardly expression of goodwill,

unfortunately in vogue at the present time with many. And above all,

this is needed between types of religious expression coming from the

study of mental phenomena--unfortunately, even now laying exclusive

claim to the name of religion--and those expressions of religion

whose heads, as it were, are penetrating more into the secrets of

heaven though their feet are clinging to the earth, I mean, the so-

called materialistic sciences.

 

To bring about this harmony, both will have to make concessions,

sometimes very large, nay more, sometimes painful, but each will find

itself the better for the sacrifice and more advanced in truth. And

in the end, the knowledge which is confined within the domain of time

and space will meet and become one with that which is beyond them

both, where the mind and senses cannot reach--the Absolute, the

Infinite, the One without a second.