ls.

Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to its
devotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurance
that their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured through
the sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only
the sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We
have great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves but
from the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer some
explanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, above
all, justify the ways of God with men.

Generally speaking, religion is very greatly dependent upon its power so
to interpret the hard things of life to those who bear them that they
may still believe in the Divine love and justice. The generality of
doubt is not philosophical but practical. We break with God more often
than for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faith
with us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found their
opportunity in the evident deficiency of the traditional explanation of
pain and sorrow. Religion has really a strong hold on the average life
only as it meets the more shadowed side of experience with the
affirmation of an all-conquering love and justice in which we may rest.

Broadly considered, then, the elements common to all religions are such
as these: a satisfying interpretation of the power manifest in the
universe, the need of the mind for an answer to the questions Whence?
and Whither? and Why?, the need of the emotional life for such peace as
may come from the consciousness of being in right relationship and
satisfying communion with God, the need of the will and ethical sense
for guidance, and a need including all this and something beside for
spiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of the
end of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departure
for the religious reactions of the last generation naturally included
all this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectually
curious were more concerned with science and political economies than
the nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are not
generally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it as
a Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible.
Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be held
abstractly. They were articulate in cre