Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 6

suggestively with these driving longings and all the later analyses of
the psychology of conversion begin with the stress of the divided self.

The deeper teaching of the New Testament roots itself in this soil. The
literature of confession is rich in classic illustrations of all this, told as
only St. Augustine more than a thousand years ago or Tolstoy
yesterday can tell it. No need to quote them here; they are easily
accessible for those who would find for their own longings immortal
voices and be taught with what searching self-analysis those who have
come out of darkness into light have dealt with their own sick souls.
Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to its
devotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurance that
their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured through the
sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only the
sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We
have great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves but
from the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer some
explanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, above
all, justify the ways of God with men.
Generally speaking, religion is very greatly dependent upon its power
so to interpret the hard things of life to those who bear them that they
may still believe in the Divine love and justice. The generality of doubt
is not philosophical but practical. We break with God more often than
for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faith with
us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found their
opportunity in the evident deficiency of the traditional explanation of
pain and sorrow. Religion has really a strong hold on the average life
only as it meets the more shadowed side of experience with the
affirmation of an all-conquering love and justice in which we may rest.
Broadly considered, then, the elements common to all religions are
such as these: a satisfying interpretation of the power manifest in the
universe, the need of the mind for an answer to the questions Whence?
and Whither? and Why?, the need of the emotional life for such peace
as may come from the consciousness of being in right relationship and
satisfying communion with God, the need of the will and ethical sense
for guidance, and a need including all this and something beside for
spiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of the

end of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departure
for the religious reactions of the last generation naturally included all
this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectually curious
were more concerned with science and political economies than the
nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are not
generally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it as a
Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible.
Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be held
abstractly. They were articulate in creeds and organized in churches
and invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated
through old, old processes of religious development.
Christianity Historically Organized Around the Conception of a
Transcendent God and a Fallen Humanity
For in its historic development religion has naturally taken distinctly
divergent forms, conditioned by race, environment, the action and
reaction of massed experience and by the temper and insight of a few
supremely great religious leaders. But centrally, the whole development
of any religion has been controlled by its conception of God and, in the
main, three different conceptions of God give colour and character to
the outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thought of
God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to the
measure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of the
universe. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mystical
quality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. The
religions of the Divine Immanence conceive God as pervading and
sustaining all that is and revealing Himself thereby, though not
necessarily confined therein. The religions of the Divine Transcendence
have believed in a God who is apart from all that is, who neither begins
nor ends in His universe, and from whom we are profoundly separated
not only by our littlenesses but by our sin.
All this is a bare statement of what is almost infinitely richer as it has
been felt and proclaimed by the devout and we shall see as we go on
how the newer religious movements take also their colour and character
from a new emphasis upon the nature of God, or else a return to

understandings of