Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 5

fitting objects of faith and devotion, all contribute to the incurable
religiosity of human nature.
[Footnote 1: I have taken as a working definition of Religion a phrase
quoted by Ward Fowler in the introduction to his Gifford Lectures on

"The Religious Experience of the Roman People." "Religion is the
effective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifesting
itself in the Universe." This is only a formula but it lends itself to vital
interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many of which
are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion just now
current which define it as a system of values or a process of
evaluation.]
The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largely
tested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God
as by any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value of
religion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet the
need of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense for right
standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simple enough to
begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were permitted,
certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These permissions and
prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may trace behind
taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an always
emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental relationship
between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first felt itself to be
the more august force and through its superior authority gave direction
and quality to the conduct of its devotees. It was long enough before all
this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on the Mount and the latter
chapters of Paul's great letters to his churches and our present system of
Christian ethics, but we discover the beginning of the lordship of
religion over conduct even in the most primitive cults.
We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion is less
marked in modern religious cults and movements than either the quest
for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three great
questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God.
They accept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christian
conduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethical
standards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them.
As has been intimated, however, the appeal of religion goes far deeper
than all this. If it did no more than seek to define for us the "power not

ourselves" everywhere made manifest, if it did no more than answer the
haunting questions: Whence? and Whither? and Why?, if it did no more
than offer the emotional life a satisfying object of worship and
communion with the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical
standards and guiding and strengthening the will in its endeavour after
goodness, it would have done us an immense service. But one may well
wonder whether if religion did no more than this it would have
maintained itself as it has and renew through the changing generations
its compelling appeal. More strong than any purely intellectual
curiosity as to a first cause or controlling power, more haunting than
any wonder as to the source and destiny of life, more persistent than
any loneliness of the questing soul is our dissatisfaction with ourselves,
our consciousness of tragic moral fault, our need of forgiveness and
deliverance. This longing for deliverance has taken many forms.
Henry Osborn Taylor in a fine passage has shown us how manifold are
the roads men have travelled in their quest for salvation.[2] "For one
man shall find his peace in action, another in the rejection of action,
even in the seeming destruction of desire; another shall have peace and
freedom through intellectual inquiry, while another must obey his God
or love his God and may stand in very conscious need of divine
salvation. The adjustment sought by Confucius was very different from
that which drew the mind of Plato or led Augustine to the City of God.
Often quite different motives may inspire the reasonings which
incidentally bring men to like conclusions.... The life adjustment of the
early Greek philosophers had to do with scientific curiosity.... They
were not like Gotama seeking relief from the tedious impermanence of
personal experience any more than they were seeking to insure their
own eternal welfare in and through the love of God, the motive around
which surged the Christian yearning for salvation. Evidently every
religion is a means of adjustment or deliverance."
[Footnote 2: "Deliverance," pp. 4 and 5.]
Professor James in his chapter on The Sick Souls deals most