Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical PsychologyAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical Psychology
Atkinson, William Walker
Psychology
But the _beliefs_ of the religious person may be considered as resulting
from intellectual processes; his religious _feelings and emotions_ arise
from another part of his mental being. It is the testimony of the
authorities of all religions that religious conviction is an inner
experience rather than an intellectual conception. The emotional element
is always active in religious manifestations everywhere. The purely
intellectual religion is naught but a philosophy. Religion without
feeling and emotion is an anomaly. In all true religion there exists a
feeling of inner assurance and faith, love, awe, dependence, submission,
reverence, gratitude, hope, and perhaps fear. The emotional element must
always be present, not necessarily in the form of emotional excess, as
in the case of revival hysteria or the dance of the whirling dervishes,
but at least in the form of the calm, fervent feeling of "that peace
which passeth understanding." When religion departs from the emotional
phase it becomes merely a "school of philosophy," or an "ethical culture
society."
The student must not lose sight of the uplifting influence of true
religious emotion by reason of his knowledge of its lowly origin. Like
the lotus, which has its roots in the slimy, filthy mud of the river,
and its stem in the muddy, stagnant, and foul waters thereof, but its
beautiful flower unfolded in the clear air and facing the sun, so is
religious feeling responsible for some of the most beautiful and
uplifting ideals and actions of the race. If its origin and history
contain much that is not consistent with the highest ideals of the race
to-day, it is not the fault of religion but of the race itself.
Religion, like all else in the universal manifestation, is under the
laws of evolution, growth, and development. What the religion of the
future may be, we know not. But the prophets of the race are dreaming
visions of a religion as much higher than that of to-day as the latter
is higher than the crude fetichism of the savage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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