The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
giving them the opportunity of exploding under pious disguises in the
religious sphere.
Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training
comes in. Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable,
especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates.
Boys are more often merely alienated by it. In both cases, the method
of presentation which regards the spiritual life simply as a normal
aspect of full human life is best. No artificial barrier should be set
up between the sacred and the profane. The passion for truth and the
passion for God should be treated as one: and that pursuit of knowledge
for its own sake, those adventurous explorations of the mind, in which
the more intelligent type of adolescent loves to try his growing powers,
ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as elsewhere. The results
of research into religious origins should be explained without
reservation, and no intellectual difficulty should be dodged. The
putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, now generally
recognized as dangerous in matters of natural history, is just as
dangerous in the religious sphere. No teacher who is afraid to state his
own position with perfect candour should ever be allowed to undertake
this side of education; nor any in whom there is a marked cleavage
between the standard of conduct and the standard of thought. The healthy
adolescent is prompt to perceive inconsistency and unsparing in its
condemnation.
Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more
necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and
non-empirical type. Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by
us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery
drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for
the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of
adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to
materialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we
particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent
spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies
wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious people,
especially those who tell us that their religion is a "comfort" to them,
go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has
starved them of love, of beauty, of interest--it has given them no
synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning--and
they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of
conventional piety. If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made
day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The
naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their
opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be
ritualistic. But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual
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