True religion in the sense I have used the word has faith in it,
the faith that there is a purpose in the universe, though it
seems impossible for us to discover it. In the personal character
it seeks to establish altruistic feeling and conduct, though it
does not rule out as unworthy self-feeling or seeking. It merely
subordinates them. It does not deny the validity of pleasure, of
the sensuous pleasures; it does not set its face against
drinking, eating, sexual love, play and entertainment, but it
urges a valid purpose as necessary for happiness and morality. It
does not glorify faith as against reason, emotion as against
intelligence; on the contrary, it holds that reason and
intelligence are the governing factors in human life and only by
use of them do we rise from the beast.
So the religious life of those we study will be of great
importance to us. In the majority of cases we shall find that
social heredity, tradition and backing will play the dominant
role, in that most, in name at least, live and die in the faith
in which they were born. We find those who identify form and
ceremonial with religion (the majority), others who identify it
with ethics and morality, and who can conceive no righteousness
out of it. Then there is the strictly modern type of person to
whom right conduct is held to have nothing to do with religious
belief and who measures Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and agnostic
by their acts and not at all by their dogma, and who thus
relegates religion, in the ordinary use of the word, to a rather
useless place in human life. Orthodoxy, piety, tolerance and
skepticism represent attitudes towards organized religion:
altruism, sympathy, good will, and fellowship are the
measurements of the unorganized religion whose mission it is to
find the purpose of life.
We have spoken throughout of man as a mosaic of character, and we
must modify this statement. A mosaic is a static collection,
whereas a man has character struggles, balance and overbalance.
Really to know a man is to get at the proportionate power of his
various trends, to understand his harmonies and disharmonies.
Character development is the story of the unification of the
traits or characters. Disharmony, disproportion of traits and
characters may be progressive and lead to disaster and mental
disease, or a balance may be reached after a struggle and what we
call reform takes place. Though our social life tends to narrow
and repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the
preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social
person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre.
On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to
unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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