PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

176 The Human Cyclesuch an institution as the Inquisition affords on the claim ofreligion to be the directing light and regulating power in ethicsand society, or religious wars and wide-spread State persecutionson its claim to guide the political life of mankind. But we mustobserve the root of this evil, which is not in true religion itself,but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration,but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with aparticular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Church. So strongis the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerantPaganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality,feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or thecult of Mithra and more vigorously what it conceived to bethe subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians;and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism withall its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led at one timeto the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-livedpersecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnava.The whole root of the historic insufficiency of religion asa guide and control of human society lies there. Churches andcreeds have, for example, stood violently in the way of philosophyand science, burned a Giordano Bruno, imprisoned aGalileo, and so generally misconducted themselves in this matterthat philosophy and science had in self-defence to turn upon Religionand rend her to pieces in order to get a free field for theirlegitimate development; and this because men in the passion anddarkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religionwas bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions aboutGod and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and thereforescrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific andphilosophical truth had to be denied in order that religious errormight survive. We see too that a narrow religious spirit oftenoppresses and impoverishes the joy and beauty of life, eitherfrom an intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans attempted it,because they could not see that religious austerity is not thewhole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, isnot the sole ethico-religious approach to God, since love, charity,gentleness, tolerance, kindliness are also and even more divine,