clings to the rites of the Church through 'the perhaps unconscious
desire to perform an act of social solidarity, to meet our fellow-men
elsewhere than on the field of material interests and distractions, to
accept the rendezvous which they offer to us and we to them, that we may
draw together and, more than that--unite and unify'. In another quarter
we may witness a new feeling for humanity resulting from the throwing
together of diverse racial elements in the melting-pot of the United
States. Zangwill's play might be cited as a document of this larger
faith, while Jane Addams has sympathetically described its genesis in
her _Newer Ideals of Peace_. Yet another expression of this instinctive
faith may be discovered in the broad human interest of much of our
modern literature and art. For the standard of orthodoxy in this
connexion requires not only that we respond to a grand conception of
humanity as a whole, but that also in particulars we are loyal to the
Terentian tag, 'Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.' The worthier
side of modern realism has done full justice to this motto.
The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, and
its influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find some
modern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion. In the
sociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware of
society and its claims constitutes religion itself. A man is converted
when his soul is 'congregationalized'. There is even a tendency to find
the highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one's
unity with one's fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy and
tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the
whole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith
in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a second
characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any
idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the
indiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic may
be defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality of
progress. We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to be
achieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed. Nietzsche
says somewhere, 'if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lack
humanity itself?' We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in the
pursuit of a common end. The search for such a goal, and the effort to
achieve it, lend worth to history and to present action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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