Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 4

importance had been established. The older denominations had
achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution
and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy
and though these controversies were severe enough they produced no
schisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leaders were
urging a more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of
the teachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with more
suspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology.

We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of the
whole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorian
epoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge of
the accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked to
meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they have
issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient orders and
new alignments along every front of human interest. It will be the task
of the historians of the future who will have the necessary material in
hand to follow these immense reactions in their various fields and they
will find their real point of departure not in dates but in the human
attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of being
final--and were not final at all.
Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. We
may date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the
last decades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions not
against a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group of
religious validations which had been built up through an immense
labour of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last
century were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a
thousand years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is
asked to wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to
begin, then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I
venture to call the representative orthodox religious consciousness of
the end of the nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian
is of course assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for
Protestantism has supplied the larger number of followers to the newer
religious movements.
To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by no
means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the
modern mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the
whole of our inheritances and can be understood only through the
analysis of all the contributive elements which have combined to make
it what it is and that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more
recent contributions. The religious mind is an equally complex and
deep-rooted inheritance and can best be approached by a consideration

of the bases of religion.
Certain Qualities Common to All Religions
We are but pilgrims down roads which space and time supply; we
cannot account for ourselves in terms of what we know to be less than
ourselves, nor can we face the shadow which falls deeply across the
end of our way without dreaming, at least, of that which lies beyond.
Whence? Whither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices
out of the depths. A very great development of intelligence was
demanded before such questions really took definite shape, but they are
implicit in even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we
outgrow them through any achievement of Science or development of
Philosophy. They become thereby, if anything, more insistent. Our
widening horizons of knowledge are always swept by a vaster
circumference of mystery into which faith must write a meaning and
beyond which faith must discern a destiny.
Religion begins, therefore, in our need so to interpret the power
manifest in the universe[1] as to come into some satisfying relationship
therewith. It goes on to supply an answer to the dominant
questions--Whence? Whither? Why? It fulfills itself in worship and
communion with what is worshipped. Such worship has addressed
itself to vast ranges of objects, fulfilled itself in an almost unbelievable
variety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been some
aspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover,
of those who worship to come into a real relation with what is
worshipped. It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to
back up so general a statement with the facts which prove it, but the
facts are beyond dispute. It would be equally difficult to analyze the
elements in human nature which lead us to seek such communion. The
essential loneliness of the soul, our sense of divided and warring
powers and the general emotional instability of personality without