the religious teaching I consider true, I should say to him that we have come into this world and live in it, not according to our own will, but according to the will of that which we call God, and that it will, therefore, be well with us only when we fulfil this will. This will is that we should all be happy; and for all to be happy there is but one means: each must act towards others as he would wish that they should act towards him. As to the questions about how the world came into existence, and what awaits us after death, I would answer to the first by the acknowledgment of my ignorance, and of the anomaly of such a question (in all the Buddhist world no such question exists); and to the second I would answer by the conjecture that the will of Him who called us into this life for our welfare leads us somewhere through death-probably for the same purpose.-The Religious Education of the Young.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGION

I. THE NEW LIFE-CONCEPTION

THE birth of the life-conception, which always takes place when mankind enters upon new conditions, and its subsequent activities, is what we call religion. Religion is not, as science regards it, a phenomenon which formerly travelled hand in hand with the development of mankind, and which has since been left behind; on the contrary, it is a phenomenon inherent to human existence itself, and never more distinctly manifested than at the present day. In the second place, religion defines future rather than past activities, therefore it is evident that an investigation of the phenomena of the past can by no means touch the essence of religion. The longing to typify the forces of nature is no more the essence of religion than is the fear of those same forces, or the need of the miraculous and its outward manifestations, as the scientists suppose. The essence of religion lies in the power of man to foreknow and to point out the way in which mankind must walk. It is a definition of a new life which will give birth to new activities. This faculty of foreknowledge concerning the density of humanity is more or less common, no doubt, to all people; still from time to time a man appears in whom the faculty has reached a higher

development, and these men have the power clearly and distinctly to formulate that which is vaguely conceived by all men, thus instituting a new life-conception from which is to flow an unwonted activity, whose results will endure for centuries to come.

Thus far there have been three of these life-conceptions; two of them belong to a bygone era, while the third is of our own time and is called Christianity. It is not that we have merged the various conceptions of the significance of life into three arbitrary divisions, but that there really have been but three distinct conceptions, by which the actions of mankind have been influenced, and save through these we have no means of comprehending life. These three life-conceptions are-firstly, the individual or animal; secondly, the social or pagan; and thirdly, the universal or divine. According to the first of these, a man's life is his personality, and that only, and his life's object is to gratify his desires. According to the second, his life is not limited to his own personality; it includes the sum and continuity of many personalities-of the family, of the race, and of the State, and his life's object is to gratify the will of the communities of individuals. And according to the third his life is confined neither to his personality nor to that of the aggregate of individuals, but finds its significance in the eternal source of all life-in God Himself. These three life-conceptions serve as the basis for the religions of every age. . . . History is but the transcript of the gradual transition from the animal life-conception of the individual to the social, and from the social to the divine. The history of the ancients for thousands of centuries, culminating in that of Rome, is the history of the evolution from the animal life-conception of the

individual to that of society and the State. From the advent of Christianity and the fall of Imperial Rome, we have the history of that change which is still going on from the social to the divine life-conception.

The distinction between the Christian doctrine and those which preceded it may be thus defined. The social doctrine says: Curb thy nature (meaning the animal nature alone), subject it to the visible law of the family, of society, and of the State. Christianity says: Live up to thy nature (meaning the divine nature); make it subject to nothing, neither to thine own animal nature, nor to that of another, and then thou shalt attain what thou seekest by subjecting thine outward personality to visible laws. The Christian doctrine restores to man his original consciousness of self, not the animal self, but the God-like self, the spark of divinity, as the son of God, like unto the Father, but clothed in a human form. This consciousness of oneself as a son of God, whose essence is love, satisfies at once all those demands made by the man who professes the social lifeconception for a broader sphere of love. Again, in the social life-conception, the enlargement of the domain of love was a necessity for the salvation of the individual; it was attached to certain objects, to oneself, to one's family, to society, and to humanity. With the Christian. world-conception love is not a necessity, neither is it attached to any special object; it is the inherent quality of a man's soul; he loves because he cannot help loving. The Christian doctrine teaches to man that the essence of his soul is love; that his well-being may be traced, not to the fact that he loves this object or that one, but to the fact that he loves the principle of all things-God, whom he recognises in himself through

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love, and will by the love of God love all men and all things.

The principal reason of all the misconceptions of the teaching of Christ is that men look upon it as one that may be accepted or rejected without any special change in one's life. . . . The universal brotherhood of man, the equality of races, the abolition of property, the anomalous doctrine of non-resistance, all these requirements of the Christian religion seem to us impossibilities. But in olden times, thousands of years ago, not only the requirements of the State, but even those of the family, as, for instance, the obligation of parents to feed their children, of children to support their aged parents, and that of conjugal fidelity, seemed equally impossible. And still more unreasonable seemed the demands of the State, requiring citizens to submit to established authority, to pay taxes, to perform military duty in defence of their country, etc. .. The time will come, and it is already near at hand, when the Christian foundations of life-equality, brotherly love, community of goods, non-resistance of evil by violence-will seem as natural and simple as the foundations of family, social, and State life appear to us at the present time.-The Kingdom of God is Within You.

To understand philosophy and science one needs study and preparation, but neither is required for the understanding of religion. An almost illiterate sectarian peasant in Russia, without the slightest mental effort, achieves the same conception of life as was accomplished by the greatest sages of the world. You may ask In what, then, does the essence of this unscientific and unphilosophical knowledge consist ?

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