In popular thought it is taken for granted that to be religious is to accept in some form or other the theocratic view that God governs the universe. If that assumption is correct then the orthodox who inveigh against the godlessness of contemporary thought and the militant atheists who rejoice in this godlessness are both right when they insist that religion is disappearing. Insofar as religion is identical with a belief in theocracy, it has indeed lost much of its reality for modern men. There is little doubt, I think, that popular religion has been always and everywhere theocratic in principle. If, then, we are to define as religion that which the overwhelming majority of mankind have cherished, it would be necessary to concede at once that the dissolution of the belief in a supernatural government of human affairs is a dissolution of religion itself. But if that is conceded, then it is necessary to concede also that many whom the world recognizes as its greatest religious teachers were not themselves religious men. For it could be demonstrated, I think, that in the central intuition of Aristotle, of the author of the Fourth Gospel, of Buddha, of Spinoza, to name only originating minds, the theocratic principle is irrelevant. No one of these teachers held the belief, [p195] which is at the heart of theocratic religion, that the relationship between God and man is somehow analogous with that of a king to his subjects, that the relationship is in any sense a transaction between personalities involving, however subtly, a quid pro quo, that God’s will and the human will are interacting forces. In place of the popular conception of religion as a matter of commandments and obedience, reward and punishment, in a word, as a form of government, these great teachers placed their emphasis upon the conversion, the education, and the discipline of the human will. Such beliefs as they had about God were not in the nature of oaths of allegiance to a superior; their concern was not to placate the will of God but to alter the will of man. This alteration of the human will they conceived as good not because God commands it, but because it is intrinsically good for man, because by the test of experience it yields happiness, serenity, whole-heartedness. Belief is not, as it is in popular religion, an act which by creating a claim upon divinity insures man’s salvation; the force of belief, as Mr. Whitehead has put it, is in “cleansing the inward parts.” Thus religion becomes “the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.”