Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 159

When we regard attentively the present state of knowledge concerning the development of religious beliefs, a very striking natural law regarding them may be seen to be slowly emerging into view. It is that all the religious systems that have influenced the race fall into two great and clearly defined categories ; and farther, that the growth of the religious faculty itself is proceeding along the line of development by which a system of religion rises from the first of these categories into the second.

If we look closely, first of all, at the second category, which includes all the higher forms of religious belief existing amongst the advanced peoples, the characteristic which is distinctive of it may be perceived at once. This is that the vital interests with which the religious beliefs included therein are concerned are not primarily interests of a material character, or even interests which are to any important degree expressed in the present time. What we have represented, over and above everything else, in the systems of belief in this higher category, is a series of ideas and conceptions by which the individual is brought into a state of consciousness of his relation to the universal and the infinite, and through which every material interest of the present is made to sink into a position of comparative insignificance.”

But when we turn now to the other category, its distinctive feature, as soon as it is pointed out, is grasped with equal readiness by the mind.

* Compare the position reached in Edward Caird’s Lvolution of Religion and his Crztical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

* We are so constantly and familiarly brought into contact with this characteristic in the prevailing forms of religious belief in our Western world, that . we are hardly conscious of one significant fact regarding it. It is entirely new and recent in the history of religious development,