The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and UseBrent, Charles Henry
Religion
The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and Use
Brent, Charles Henry
New Thought
Faith has become increasingly rational as the world has grown older and
experience has been added to experience. Its explorations in the world
of ideals have been more frequent and daring with the advance of time.
Consequently the man of to-day makes his flights thitherwards with a
fulness of assurance on rational grounds or grounds of high probability
which would have been impossible to an Abraham. If the triumphs open
to faith have multiplied, so have the deterrent forces holding it back
or set in battle array to thwart or otherwise impair it. The commonest
injury wrought upon faith is the deflecting of it from the worthy to
the unworthy or less worthy. If a man’s Mystic Sense, acute in other
directions, is dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason is usually
to be found, I think, in circumstances analogous to those which make a
student of _belles lettres_, for instance, indifferent to science, or a
philosopher careless of the exploits of commerce, cases of which are not
wanting. The mind finds higher pleasure among certain persons in being
exclusive and technical than in being catholic. So the Mystic Sense can
fall short of its highest employment simply because there is not in
its possessor the will to employ it commensurately with its capacity.
The explanation why some men are not actively religious must be sought
elsewhere than in the contention that they are short a faculty. The
Mystic Sense, which by virtue of their humanity they possess, is not
employed by them religiously from whatever reason—defective interest,
prejudice, antagonism, environment. Nevertheless the same inner sense is
pushed to its fullest activity in other directions. The faculty which by
a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative
subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables
us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” The consideration of
vicious men who are irreligious does not come within the purview of this
discussion. Religion and vice are mutually exclusive, though piety and
immorality are not, so that we have the anomaly of immoral character
revelling in pious practices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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