The name is absent

Religion               81

to please the Churches religion is wounded by its professed
friends. How often like cave-dwellers these have been not
only contented to live in the twilight of faith, but have
clutched at the skirts of the men of vision when they called
to their fellows to venture forth with them into the fuller
light of the opening day.

Great though the contribution made by the institutions
of religion to civilization has been, religion itself is at once
broader than these institutions, and is a more intimate and
enduring factor in the formation of character on which
genuine culture rests. The heart of religion is its faith.
This is a conviction in the depths of a man’s being that his
life has been set in a sphere in which the Sovereign Good is
working out His purpose; therefore he endeavors to find
permanent values in his present experience, baffled indeed
very often but never losing his serene belief that the search
is not futile. In his religious hope he is in the line of those
noble souls who have believed that there is something best
of all to acquire. All sorts of alluring values—wealth,
health, comfort, social position—have been and are pur-
sued by average men; but round about the highest Good
they flicker and perish. Even the scholar’s learning, the
knowledge of the man of science, the emotion of the artist,
have never been accepted by philosophers as the final Good.
These are but anticipations of the abiding and the supreme.
Something more enduring and universal must be found.
The essence of the Christian religion is that essential Love
is enthroned as the primal and sovereign motive power of
all Being, and that the Supreme Good is to be found in a
Realm, partially existent upon earth, but to be revealed
fully hereafter, in which truth, beauty, and goodness will
be made progressively manifest in the fuller unveiling of
the Divine: also that an invisible Artist of matchless skill

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