Divine. What kind of intercourse can God be supposed to hold with Man
if the latter is to be left to his own devices in what he must needs
regard as among the more important aspects of his life,--in his
commercial and industrial enterprises, in his art, in his literature,
in his study of Nature's laws, in his mastery of Nature's forces,
in his pursuit of positive truth and practical good? As in these
matters Man frees himself, little by little, from the yoke of
supernaturalism, which he has been accustomed to identify with
religion, his formal conception of his relation to God and of the
part that God plays in his life--the conception that is defined and
elucidated for him by religious "orthodoxy"--becomes of necessity
more irrational, more mechanical, more unreal, more repugnant to his
better nature and to the higher developments of his "common-sense."
The tendency to exalt the letter of what is spoken or written, at the
expense of the spirit, is as much of the essence of ecclesiasticism
as of legalism. "_Si dans les regles du salut le fond l'emporterait
sur la forme, ce serait la ruine du sacerdoce._" And, as a matter of
experience, the hair-splitting puerilities of Pharisaism under the
Old Dispensation have been matched, and more than matched, in the
spheres of ritual, of dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality,
under the New. As Man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his
being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this
puerile element in religion--the element of ultra-formalism, of
irrationality, of unreality--tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to
itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but
is now degenerating into a "body of death." If, in these days of
absorbing secular activity, Man continues to tolerate the theories
and practices of the religious experts, the reason is--apart from the
influence of custom and tradition and of his respect for venerable
and "established" institutions--that they are things which he has
neither time nor inclination to investigate, and which he can
therefore afford to tolerate as being far removed from what is vital
and central in his life. I am told that the Catholic Church holds, in
the case of a dying man, "that the eternal fate of the soul, for good
or for evil, may depend upon the reception or the non-reception of
absolution, and even of extreme unction." That the truly appalling
conception of God which is implicit in this sent