From Bondage to Liberty in Religion A Spiritual Autobiography

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

When the traveller, bent on some important quest, makes a prolonged and perilous journey and returns in safety to his friends and neighbors, instinctively those who have known him in former years realize that he is, and he is not, the same person who had dwelt among them. He has seen unfamiliar peoples, traversed strange lands, encountered unexpected dangers. Old prepossessions have been effaced, erroneous opinions have been corrected, new habits of thought have taken the place of old ones and the narrow world of youth has expanded on every side. Naturally, what has happened to him becomes a matter of curiosity and enquiry, and the hero of a great achievement is expected to relate the story of his adventures.

The man who, in these revolutionary days, takes religion seriously—there are many who do not—must make a journey which is fraught with as many surprises and filled with as many anxieties—especially if it be a pilgrimage from orthodoxy to personal independence—as that which the explorer encounters in a voyage to the North Pole or the jungles of Africa. At every turning of the way he must be prepared for disillusions and the discovery of facts and errors which call for unlimited courage and boundless faith. Religion is not simply a matter of the emotions, its very perpetuity depends upon that sane and persistent activity of the intellect without which the emotions are tyrannous and fateful. Emotion in religion is the driving force by which religion may be applied to human welfare, but if emotion be not governed and directed by the well-trained intellect, informed by patient thought and the use of all the evidence available from those who are entitled to be summoned as witnesses, the result inevitably is merely a matter of superstition, or a spineless acquiescence in old and futile beliefs. To continue all the while to believe in religion while one is pursuing a course of reasoning which is bound to shatter many of the interpretations of it which one has previously accepted, requires the kind of intellectual endurance and the quality of faith which characterize the inventor, or the scientific explorer.

When the author of this volume, as an unquestioning disciple of his ancestral fellowship, earnestly sought to pledge all that he was and all that he hoped to become to the salvation of those who he believed stood in peril of everlasting torment, it was the unadulterated spirit of religion which prompted him. But he was at that time unaware of that fact. Religion was with him when it moved him to give himself for others, but to him religion was itself something entirely different. He was urged and commanded by a force, old as mankind, and it took him, as the reader of these pages will see, many years of heart-breaking endeavor, to learn that what most he desired was what most he possessed. His quest was a long and weary one, and the reality of it and the importance of it to him are proven by the thoroughness and the eloquence with which his spiritual experience is recalled and set down in these pages....