Spiritual Energies in Daily Life (ePub)

Religion is an experience which no definition exhausts. One writer with expert knowledge of anthropology tells us what it is, and we know as we read his account that, however true it may be as far as it goes, it yet leaves untouched much undiscovered territory. We turn next to the trained psychologist, who leads us "down the labyrinthine ways of our own mind" and tells us why the human race has always been seeking God and worshiping Him. We are thankful for his Ariadne thread which guides us within the maze, but we feel convinced that there are doors which he has not opened-"doors to which he had no key." The theologian, with great assurance and without "ifs and buts," offers us the answer to all mysteries and the solution of all problems, but when we have gone "up the hill all the way to the very top" with him, we find it a "homesick peak"- Heimwehfluh -and we still wonder over the real meaning of religion.

We are evidently dealing here with something like that drinking horn which the Norse God Thor tried to drain. He failed to do it because the horn which he assayed to empty debouched into the endless ocean, and therefore to drain the horn meant drinking the ocean dry. To probe religion down to the bottom means knowing "what God and man is." Each one of us, in his own tongue and in terms of his own field of knowledge, gives his partial word, his tiny glimpse of insight. But the returns are never all in. There is always more to say. "Man is incurably religious," that fine scholar, Auguste Sabatier, said. Yes, he is. It is often wild and erratic religion which we find, no doubt, but the hunger and thirst of the human soul are an indubitable fact. In different forms of speech we can all say with St. Augustine of Hippo: "Thou hast touched me and I am on fire for thy peace."