LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and
most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief
that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in
harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment
are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call
your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an
attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our
attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due
to the “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to
exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may
be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In
either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to
things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to
sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may
make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently
more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of
making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is
based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a
weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.
The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they
worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for
example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of
their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by
way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force
of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine
personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in
general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in
the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.
But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,
religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.
God’s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his
absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri‐unity, the various
mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,
etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian
believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible
images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all
religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation
of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and
abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the
believer’s subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.
Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,
the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.
These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our
conceptions always require a sense‐content to work with, and as the words
“soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense‐content whatever,
it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any
significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our
practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;
consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as
if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a
genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_...