Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 265, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 November 1911 — IMITATION IN RELIGION [ARTICLE]

IMITATION IN RELIGION

THERE IS NOTHING more imitative than our religious experience; nothing that seems to ourselves more profoundly original; nothing in which we follow more closely the "footsteps of others. By this I do not mesa to imply that our religious feelings are not genuine. Quite the contrary. We can be as sincere in a suggested emotion as in e spontaneous emocon. I believe In the religious feeling. 1 believe it to be the highest functioning of the human intelligence, nut 1 am of those who l-\bor to free it from' Ignorance, irrationality and base alloy, and to get it property aet in its true psychological place. Religion lc not the private property of the Church, u belongs to mankind. It, ‘doubtless, exists in the House of God, but it is ako in the outdoor of God, and there's h lot more outdoor space in the universe than there ever will be houseroom. I state this to set myself right v?uh the reader; I sympathize with and love ail honest religious feeling. but most cf the feelings, of any kind, wnich we think our very own are imitative. The lover feels about as he has heard and read that otuers feel; the instinct is his own, its form is mimicked. We get angry at those things at which a man is supposed to get angry. A young Albanian private iu the Turkish army, the other day, was executed for stabbing his captain, who had slapped hia' face. His defense was that his people always killed those-who slapped their faces. He was willing to die to keep step with a racial impulse. We eat and drink under the die-! tates of tasteß which are copied. When we go to Marseilles we eat bouillabaisse, at Strasbourg we eat pate de foie gras, at Budapest we eat goulash, at Naples we eat macaroni, in Germany we eat Limburger cheese, in Boston we eat beans; and iu each instance good livers can throw themselves Into a genuine imitative craving and relish for the specific dish of tae locality. The most accomplished gourmets are those with the most adaptable palates. We build our houses to suit certain notions of personal comfort which we have inherited from our people or absorbed from our environment. When we travel we consult Baedeker, oi; follow the suggestions of friends in selecting the places .there we are to let our enthusiam loc?<*. A woman buys a hat not to plecee herself, but to please , other women, or make them green, and thus enjoys an emotion all the more intense because it Is secondhand —I mean the emotion is ueeondhand, not the hat. So, looking back, I can see how all my early religious experiences were run into moulds ready-made for me by my surroundings. 1 was not satisfied until 1 had all the forms of emotion others said they had. When 1 awoke to this fact, I was at first inclined to doubt ths> genuinness of my feelings; but more mature reflection brought me about to see that, while the manners and shapes of my sentiments were copies, the core and gis> of them wdre truly my own— the moving of a deep, entirely individual and personal instinct.

Does this not explain some peculiar religious phenomena? For instance, the permanence of religious institutions, the fixity of creeds, the long life of churcnes, generation after generation growing up and passing tarough the same forms of faith? Does it not expla'n also the remarkable spread, the e lidemic nature oi new religions, how they seem to ditch and go like fire, increasing In arith metical progression ? And does tt not explain also the slow progress of trying to apply rational, ecieutiflc methods to religious thought'. It requires the constant effort of reformers, prophets, saints and heroes to keep religion from kandening lute empty form or running away into a travestied sentimentally, and to keet it near to the Individual, genuine truth Religion is eternal, because' it is human. All churches are true, In a way. The Jew, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Christian Scientist, each is trying out, in the long experiment ot years, some particular phase of the truth. Each, doubtless, will have a part in forming that sweet and reasonable religion, that rational,' intelligent, perfect attitude toward the Infinite which our children’s chtldrei shall count not the least ami ag tli treasure v we have wrought for th n with our highest effort—the religion o. tomorrow.