The Relationship Between God and Man

  

       AT our previous meetings we examined one of the foundations on which religion rests or perhaps I should rather say one of the indispensable elements in which religion consists—I mean man's belief in a superhuman power which works everywhere and in everything. 

          This is not a mere philosophical theory or an abstraction designed to satisfy man's craving for knowledge nor is it a purely mental attempt to account for the world of phenomena we see around us—whether that world be the whole universe such as we conceive it to be or merely that limited portion of it that falls within the ken of uncivilised or primitive man and constitutes his whole world—but it is a religious conviction that is to say it exerts a direct and immediate influence on man's emotional life. 

          For the phenomena which the religious man thus accounts for are precisely those which are bound up with his existence his welfare and his whole destiny; and the conviction that they reveal to him a superhuman power at once awakens in him a corresponding sentiment of awe and veneration of gratitude and trust towards that power and a sense of his obligation to obey and revere it above all others. 

           Without this belief no religion can possibly exist. It is the fountainhead of all religions. If it is lost the old religious institutions may for a time be maintained and the performance of the old religious observances may for a time be ensured by the force of habit and tradition but the life of such a religion is extinct. 

            Just as the machine must soon stop when its motive power has ceased to act although its wheels may continue idly to revolve a little longer so must such a religion inevitably perish. A God above us—that is the belief without which no religious life is possible.