Man and the Attainment of Immortality (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Man and the Attainment of ImmortalityThat this period of stress and of fierce challenge should have been without its in¿uence on that whole range of thought and activity that may be covered by the word Religion, was not to be expected. If some were persuaded by the very course of things that the world in which they found themselves was indeed God's world, there were many on the other hand whose contribution to the scrap-heaps of the war was religion, or what they deemed to be religion. In addition to the moral issues that were involved in the question of what kind of a world it could be in which such a cataclysm was possible, there was the circumstance that the whole conduct of the war was a matter of exact science in a degree which was true of no previous war in history. The mathematician won greater victories than the musketeer: the engineer had everywhere laid the basis of success If there were branches of science that were put under heavy contri bution in the saving and restoring of human life, there was no corner of the known that had not been ransacked for the wherewithal to destroy it. It was science ordered, tested, exact, organised knowledge - that was the sign in which men had conquered blessed be Science which gave us the victory! She it is that alone can guarantee certitude, and what goes counter to, or tran scends the limits of, her achievements, either of state ment or construction, may well be looked at askance. There is a realm of hard and fast fact, of things that can be known, and that with certainty, in a way to which there is nothing comparable in the whole field of religion. A life of faith all up in the air, so to speak, and un related to everything else that is known, is not a matter for serious consideration in an age of continuously menacing realism. Such have been, and are, the thoughts consciously and subconsciously at work in the minds of many to-day, and with ample reason.Nevertheless the fact remains that investigation of the long history of mankind has disclosed no period in which the most distinctive thing about him has not been his sense of Powers or a Power, expressing itself in the universe, with which he instinctively wished to come into some sort of a satisfactory relationship. There is in man a sense of need and dependence on something without him there is that in his being which goes out to something in the universe which he feels secures his place in it, and with which he desires to be at one. Challenged from the dawn of intelligence by the world order external to him, and impelled by his sense of need, he has committed himself to that world order in one way or another. As the initial acts of self-committal proved to be justified, man with his awakening mind made ever greater demands upon that order, and in turn began to feel its demands upon himself. 3'7man, that is to say, whether he likes it or not, is dis tinctively the religious creature. Man, constituted as he is, cannot help being religious, however different the expressions and form of the sense of the relation that religion represents. Thus the Bible did not make religion: rather did religion make the Bible, and the Koran and the Indian Vedas also, for that matter. The word Religion has had to cover an immense range of experience, from primitive man's tremulous response to lightning and thunder, or the feelings associated with the hesitant yet expectant sowing of his scant seed in the earth, up to conscious fellowship with Jesus Christ. Religion is a capacity and character - a higher awareness and responsiveness - that have developed with man's mental and spiritual progress, of which the growing revelation of God to man has been the converse side. In short, it is the last and highest expression of that élan vital that has characterised the whole history of life from the beginning - that reaching out towards a richer, completer, more harmonious life which was all uncon scious until it be...