CHAPTER I

RELIGION


Religion is experience. It is the response of man's nature to his
highest inspirations. It is his intercourse with Being above himself and
his world.

Religion is _normal_ experience. Its enemies call it "an indelible
superstition," and its friends assert that man is born believing. That a
few persons, here and there, appear to lack the sense for the Invisible
no more argues against its naturalness than that occasionally a man is
found to be colorblind or without an ear for music. Mr. Lecky has
written, "That religious instincts are as truly part of our natures as
are our appetites and our nerves is a fact which all history
establishes, and which forms one of the strongest proofs of the reality
of that unseen world to which the soul of man continually tends."

Some have sought to discredit religion as a surviving childishness. A
baby is dependent upon its parents; and babyish spirits, they say,
never outgrow this sense of dependence, but transfer that on which they
rely from the seen to the unseen. While, however, other childish things,
like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be "incurably
religious," and the most completely devout natures, although childlike
in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity. When
one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in
the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And