rmula but it lends itself to
vital interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many of
which are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion just
now current which define it as a system of values or a process of
evaluation.]

The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largely
tested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God as
by any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value of
religion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet the
need of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense for
right standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simple
enough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were
permitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These
permissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may
trace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an
always emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental
relationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first
felt itself to be the more august force and through its superior
authority gave direction and quality to the conduct of its devotees. It
was long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on
the Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to his
churches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover the
beginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the most
primitive cults.

We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion is
less marked in modern religious cults and movements than either the
quest for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three great
questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. They
accept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christian
conduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethical
standards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them.

As has been intimated, however, the appeal of religion goes far deeper
than all this. If it did no more than seek to define for us the "power
not ourselves" everywhere made manifest, if it did no more than answer
the haunting questions: Whence? and Whither? and Why?, if it did no more
than offer the emotional life a satisfying object of worship and
communion with the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical standards
and guiding and strengthening the wil