ABSTRACT

Religion is for simple people, and so must itself be simple. A theory which ignores this simplicity must be mistaken. As for feeling, it is clear that religious experience is emotional, and the emotion may be of great intensity. If one considers religious emotion without reference to its object, it is commonly described on the humbler levels as consolation. In the mystic experience it rises to the pitch of ecstasy. Like every other spiritual activity, including science itself, religion has developed historically out of something very primitive, and it may well have roots in the strange twilight region of the subconscious and the unconscious. The factor of intellectual recognition is much harder to describe, for it is here that religion passes insensibly into theology, and so the subtle begins to prevail over the simple. The religious man recognizes that he can do nothing of himself and that everything comes to him by divine grace.