The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 446may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them/ should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God's simplicity ?
Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete ? In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure.
He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the * closet-naturalists,' as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun.
But surely the systematic theologians are the closetnaturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense.
What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word * God ' by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them.
One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms ; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone ; instead of a fish, a serpent.
Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from p. 447this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated ■'X adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors.
All these things are aftereffects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of y vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in scecula sceculorum in the hves of humble private men. So much for the metaphysical attributes of God !
From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind. What shall we now say of the attributes called moral ? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing, jy They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God's holiness, for example : being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnijDotent, he can secure its triumph. Bemg omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them.
That God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters hke these exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to rehgious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her arguments ?
p. 448It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it.
To prove God's goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound to such a witness simply siUy. No ! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity : " I will lay mine hand upon my mouth ; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.
An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence — such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still.^ We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatic theology. In aU sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern ideaHsm, I repeat, has said good-by to this theology forever.
Can modern ideahsm give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness ? The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the 1 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic ?
Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation ; and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.
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