The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 828unreasonable only in case he did not exist.
If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by vhtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent ; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.
To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain behefs abhorrent. But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution.
Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory : the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in.
To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished. 1 ] ^ /
p. 329Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him.
He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will, — or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield.
So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless ; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values ; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten.
It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans ; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies ; Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions ; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of .us now living will be judged by our descendants.
When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible. Few historic changes are more curious than these jnutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of /JX sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination.
They called the cruelty 'retributive justice,' and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not ' sovereign ' enough. But p. 330to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted ; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ' delightful conviction,' as of a doctrine ' exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,' appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.
Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes.
Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-jjuritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childi_sh chara^^ taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his ' glory ' incomprehensibly enhanced thereby; — just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.
Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.
So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men's religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life.
It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is
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