The
Religion of Humanity
A RELIGION of humanity may be either an intellectual and
sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and
practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, and
partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanity. The
intellectual religion of humanity already to a certain extent exists, partly as
a conscious creed in the minds of a few, partly as a potent shadow in the
consciousness of the race. It is the shadow of a spirit that is yet unborn, but
is preparing for its birth. This material world of ours, besides its fully
embodied things of the present, is peopled by such powerful shadows, ghosts of
things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are
very troublesome actualities and they now abound, ghosts of dead religions,
dead arts, dead moralities, dead political theories, which still claim either
to keep their rotting bodies or to animate partly the existing body of things.
Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise
backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity. But
there are too those unborn spirits which are still unable to take a definite
body, but are already mind-born and exist as influences of which the human mind
is aware and to which it now responds in a desultory and confused fashion. The
religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the mãnasa
putra 1 of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a
substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianity. It tried
to give itself a body in Positivism, which was an attempt to formulate the
dogmas of this religion, but on too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis
for acceptance even by an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism has been its most
prominent emotional result. Philanthropy, .social service
1 Mind-born child, an idea
and expression of Indian Puranic cosmology.
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and other kindred activities have been its outward
expression of good works. Democracy, socialism, pacifictsm are to a great
extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour to its inner
presence.
The
fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by
man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and
human life are the chief duty and chief aim of the human spirit. No other idol,
neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its
place; they are only worthy of respect So far as they are images of the human
spirit and. enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation. But where the
cult of these idols seeks to usurp the place of the spirit and makes demands
inconsistent with. its service, they should be put aside. No injunctions of old
creeds, religious, political, social or cultural, are valid when they go
against its claims. Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idol~,
must not be allowed to make claims contrary to its ethical temperament and aim,
for science is only valuable in so far as it helps and serves by knowledge and
progress the religion of humanity. War, capital punishment, the taking of human
life, cruelty of all kinds whether committed by the individual, the State or
society, not only physical cruelty, but moral cruelty, the degradation of any
human being or any class of human beings under whatever specious plea or in
whatever interest, the oppression and exploitation of man by man, of class by
class, of nation by nation and all those habits of life and institutions of
society of a similar kind which religion and ethics formerly tolerated or even
favoured in practice, whatever they might do in their ideal rule or creed, are
crimes against the religion of humanity, abominable to its ethical mind,
forbidden by its primary tenets, to be fought against always, in no degree to
be tolerated. Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race,
creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body
of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by
science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held
sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart of man is to be
held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppres-
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sion, from mechanisation, freed from belittling
influences. The mind of man is to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom
and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and
self-development and organised in the play of its powers for the service of
humanity. And all this too is not to be held as an abstract or pious sentiment,
but given full and practical recognition in the persons of men and nations and
mankind. This, speaking largely, is the idea and spirit of the intellectual
religion of humanity.
One has
only to compare human life and thought and feeling a century or two ago with
human life, thought and feeling in the pre-war period to see how great an
influence this religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful a work it
has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to
do effectively, largely because it acted as a constant intellectual and
critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of the thing that is and an unflinching
champion of the thing to be, faithful always to the future, while orthodox
religion allied itself with the powers of the present, even of the past, bound
itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as a mode- rating but
not as a reforming force. Moreover, this religion has faith in humanity and its
earthly future and can therefore aid its earthly progress, while the orthodox
religions looked with eyes of pious sorrow and gloom on the earthly life of man
and were very ready to bid him bear peacefully and contentedly, even to welcome
its crudities, cruelties, oppressions, tribulations as a means for learning to
appreciate and for earning the better life which will be given us hereafter.
Faith, even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles, and
this religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling
form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect
comparatively much of what it set out to do. It, to some degree, humanised society, humanised law and punishment,
humanised the outlook of man on man, abolished legalised torture and the cruder
forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes
to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service of mankind, encouraged
everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly mini-
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mised its more brutal expressions. It had almost
succeeded in humanising war and would perhaps have succeeded entirely but for the
contrary trend of modern Science. It made it possible for man to conceive of a
world free from war as imaginable even without waiting for the Christian
millennium. At any rate, this much change came about that, while peace was
formerly a rare interlude of constant war, war became an interlude, if a much
too frequent interlude of peace, though as yet only of an armed peace. That may
not be a great step, but still it was a step for- ward. It gave new conceptions
of the dignity of the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his
education, self- development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; it made
man feel more his responsibility for the progress and happiness of the race; it
raised the average self-respect and capacity of mankind; it gave hope to the
serf, self-assertion to the down- trodden and made the labourer in his manhood
the potential equal of the rich and powerful. True, if we compare what is with
what should be, the actual achievement with the ideal, all this will seem only
a scanty work of preparation. But it was a remarkable record for a century and
a half or a little more and for an unembodied spirit which had to work through
what instruments it could find and had as yet no form, habitation or visible
engine of its own concentrated workings. But perhaps it was in this that lay
its power and advantage, since that saved it from crystallising into a form and
getting petrified or at least losing its more free and subtle action.
But still
in order to accomplish all its future, this idea and religion of humanity has
to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperative. For
otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of the few and with the
mass it will be only a modifying influence, but will not be the rule of human
life. And so long as that is so, it cannot entirely prevail over its own
principal enemy. That enemy, the enemy of all real religion, is human egoism,
the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. These it could
for a time soften, modify, force to curb their more arrogant, open and brutal
expressions, oblige to adopt better institutions, but not to give place to the
love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and
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man. For that essentially must be the aim of the
religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim of all human religion,
love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness
and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and life, the ideal which was
expressed first some thou- sands of years ago in the ancient Vedic hymn 1
and must always remain the
highest injunction of the Spirit within us to human life upon earth. Till that
is brought about, the religion of humanity remains unaccomplished. With that
done, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without
which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity can be
real and secure. If it is done, that outward unification may not even be
indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not as now it
seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of the human mind,
and will be held secure by an essential need of our perfected and developed
human nature.
But this
is the question whether a purely intellectual and sentimental religion of
humanity will be sufficient to bring about so great a change in our psychology.
The weakness of the intellectual idea, even when it supports itself by an
appeal to the sentiments and emotions, is that it does not get at the centre of
man's being. The intellect and the feelings are only instruments of the being
and they may be the instruments of either its lower external form or of the
inner and higher man, servants of the ego or channels of the soul. The aim of
the religion of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century by a sort of
primal intuition; that aim was and it is still to re-create human society in
the image of three kindred ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity. None of
these has really been won in spite of all the progress that has been achieved.
The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed as an essential of modern
progress is an outward and mechanical and unreal liberty. The equality that has
been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical
and will turn out to be an unreal equality. Fraternity is not even claimed to
be a practicable principle of the ordering of life and what is put forward as
its substitute is the outward and mechanical principle of equal association or
at the best a comradeship
1
Rig Veda, X. 191.
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of labour. This is because the idea of humanity has
been obliged in an intellectual age to mask its true character of a religion
and a thing of the soul and the spirit and to appeal to the vital and physical
mind of man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to the
attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to bring about
such a modification of the ideas and sentiments of the common mind of mankind
as would make these institutions practicable; it has worked at the machinery of
human life and on the outer mind much more than upon the soul of the race. It
has laboured to establish a political, social and legal liberty, equality and
mutual help in an equal association.
But though
these aims are of great importance in their own field, they are not the central
thing; they can only be secure when founded upon a change of the inner human
nature and inner way of living; they are themselves of importance only as means
for giving a greater scope and a better field for man's development towards
that change and, when it is once achieved, as an outward expression of the
larger inward life. Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the
soul; they can- not be really achieved through the external machinery of
society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal
ego. When the ego claims liberty, it arrives at competitive individualism. When
it asserts equality, it arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore
the variations of Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it
constructs an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues
liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at
equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of
fraternity is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature. All that it
knows is association for the pursuit of common egoistic ends and the utmost
that it can arrive at is a closer organisation for the equal distribution of
labour, production, consumption and enjoyment.
Yet is
brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The
union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood
and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the
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soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For
this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital
association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is
the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man
in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom
equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all
human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal
freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and
feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. These three
things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the
eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this
truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to
live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion,
and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can
fulfil itself in the life of the race.
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