RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS .sx I. .sx A FEW weeks ago I came across what I may describe as an irritated protest against the constant reference to the decay of religion in our time .sx The writer contended it was being overdone , and that in any case the decay of religion does not matter much .sx In answer to these two contentions we must say at the outset that it is obvious that no authoritative religious note is now sounding , and secondly , that we have enough evidence for the conviction that it matters profoundly whether we have a deeply-rooted religious belief or not .sx In regard to the first point , the decay of religion , our experience is not only that many whom we meet to-day guide their lives apparently with little or no reference to a belief in God , but also that in the very seat of religion , the organised religious societies , belief is shadowy .sx I have no wish to pile up the evidences which are to be found in the Religious Society of Friends , but I take merely that which may be gathered by any of us in the course of attendance at Friends' meetings through a course of years .sx The question I would put to any sensitive and observant Friend is this .sx Is it not true that the ministry is mainly concerned with questions of morals and conduct , points of practice , the need for Peace for example , and a better spirit between the nations , with perhaps a plea almost pathetically forlorn for the religious outlook or the practice of religion ?sx But on how many occasions can we say we have listened to those who have `met with the Seed' and speak out of a first-hand experience of God ?sx Do we find many parallels to those first utterances of the Quakers which issued from a life lived with God ?sx My own answer must be that I am convinced that what afflicts many of us in the Society of Friends is what I must describe as a `religious atheism .sx ' That is not very easy to define .sx Let us put it like this .sx There are many who would admit that to explain Nature we must grant the existence of some creative force , an evolutionary urge , a universal energy ; for things have not come about by their own accord .sx Our own relation to this force , or urge , or what-ever else we like to call it , is that it accounts for our existence .sx It is a light which lightens our minds .sx But it must not be imagined that if we get as far as that , we are believers in the .sx Inward Light or are truly religious .sx For all the terms I have used have reference to an impersonal creative power , whereas the doctrine of the Inward Light relates to a Living Power , a Living Light , indeed a Personal Being , whose dwelling is actually in our own spirits .sx There is the world of difference between these two positions .sx The first is an intellectual stand-point or admission , the second is a life :sx the first is atheistic , the second is theistic .sx My contention is that you will find a great many who hold the first view , but few who hold the second and , I venture to state , in the Society of Friends .sx These people are religious to the extent that it is obviously better to believe something about life than nothing ; better to believe that the whole cosmos is bound into a community because of the common possession in and through all things of one creative energy .sx But their position falls infinitely short of the religious conviction which expresses itself in the phrase already quoted , " I have met with the Seed " ; I have trafficked in my soul with God ; I have met my Like , greater than I , yet of one kin to me , person with Person .sx This is the pronouncement of religion ; anything short of it must be classed as atheism .sx I feel that this must be said , not because we denounce the atheists amongst us , but that we may see where we are , and understand that while good works must always be classed as good , they cannot be offered as a substitute for belief in God .sx I am , I must admit , deeply impressed by the Russian attempt to get rid of religion altogether , and the contention made in Russia that modern knowledge disposes of God .sx Biology , as it is said , leaves no room for God , and an expanding universe has expanded God to nothing .sx The gulf between science and religion has not been bridged .sx We stand in the same position as that in which the Stoics stood , and lost themselves , generations ago .sx We are possessed of a world view to-day very similar to theirs ; with them we believe in a rational principle in all things and accounting for them , but equally now as then God may be lost .sx Our world view indeed leaves apparently no room for God as Person .sx And science shows few signs of giving us a Personal God indeed it cannot or even of allowing room for the belief in a Personal God the Living and Loving Light of men's souls .sx While on the subject of science , we ought to add that religion does not get its mandate from science , it does not wait , and never has waited , for its permission to believe .sx Religion has reasons of its own , and while unquestionably science pre-vents religion from being crude or one-sided in thought and action , it can do no more .sx The sanction of religion is to be found in experience , with which science has nothing to do .sx Science deals with another world altogether , not with the world of inner experience .sx It can , however , provide the subject matter on which the eye and mind of religion play , and the answer which religion gives must not be contrary to the world as it is displayed to us by the research and discovery of science .sx Since religion is an activity of the whole being , the mind cannot be denied , without disaster ; and our religious atheists are at least honest in theirconviction that the premises on which they have to base their religious belief , premises partly afforded by modern scientific knowledge , prohibit the belief in a Personal God .sx Let us then address ourselves to this question :sx do things as we find them point towards an impersonal or a personal universe ?sx Can the mind be satisfied on this point so that it may gladly march with what we call direct religious experience ?sx I do not pretend I can answer this question , for there are many things that are beyond my mind .sx I cannot fathom satisfactorily to my mind the mystery of time , the mystery of immortality , and still more , the mystery of God's relationship to the universe .sx I feel that the mind has to be content with certain problems unresolved , and to make an act of faith .sx But on the near side of eternity as it were , I find many things here by my hand which set my mind coursing on the road to religion .sx Leaving the prime fact of Personality for later discussion , I come to some others .sx If I were looking on the world for the first time , I should be impressed first , by the fact of what may be called " presence .sx " The world is .sx My mind stands amazed over this fact :sx my imagination stirred and aglow .sx Mere existence is a fact of knowledge .sx It is also a religious fact .sx Religion has claimed , and still claims , that things are not of their own volition , but because they are willed and to be willed demands nothing short of a Living Will as their origin and cause .sx Not only is presence given a datum but actually the evidence of will .sx Up to the point where life emerges we may be content with an explanation of " presence " and of developing change which mechanical laws will cover , though I could not .sx But when life appears , it is another story .sx It is will-full , experimental , insurgent , free , elastic , adaptive .sx Every epithet which comes to our lips in our effort to describe it spells will in operation .sx Whence its source :sx in each particular thing arising from nowhere , unrelated to anything else ?sx No !sx Things are bound together .sx A common will stirs in them .sx The mind's answer is that :sx the religious answer is that in all things a Living Will manifests Itself .sx It is there , part of the " presence , " wrapped up in it , infusing it all , not springing up spontaneously in each new appearance , but becoming apparent because it is there , always , eternally self-existent , above , through and in all things .sx Further , the things which appear do not do so in any haphazard way .sx The notion of accident may satisfy some .sx It certainly has not satisfied the profoundest minds .sx Things hang together so obviously , and so richly , that the notion of order , of arrangement , of patterning , forces itself upon our notice as a thing given .sx How beautifully ordered is cell division :sx how ordered the relations between what are called the upper partials , the harmonics , with any fundamental musical note we care to sound ; how patterned is the eye , or the snowflake :sx how lovely is the pattern of the nebulae :sx how ordered and how constant are the laws of the universe .sx How things fit in !sx They are in place , the universe is a home to them .sx My mind , for example , does not find itself in a strange place , an alien place , hostile to it .sx Far otherwise .sx I .sx find it is possible to think , to go from one thing to the next in a related order , because I live in an environment which is of its very nature an order and with which my mind fits .sx These are not fancies but facts .sx They are data .sx The mind has something positive to work on here .sx It may with justice argue from the fact of the evident order of things to an ordering Will .sx The religious mind has its own answer .sx Believing in God , it says , " It is but natural that the work and creation of God's living will should bear the marks of an ordering mind .sx " The mind itself which reflects on these things is a datum .sx Here also is a cosmic fact .sx Does it spring up spontaneously in each thinking being , unrelated ; or does not its existence point in one direction inevitably , to a source like itself a Thinking Mind ?sx I have no desire to run over the whole gamut of what are the given things , on which the mind dwelling would base a religious interpretation of things .sx But since we so readily lose sight of the near by because it is familiar , we may profitably remind ourselves of one or two more data .sx If seen for the first time , what should we make of the fact that life , mind , personality correspond with that which in chemical analysis proves to be in strict truth of earth I mean , of course , our physical organism ?sx A few simple elements as we glibly and rather foolishly call them are set in relation with one another , a little carbon , calcium , oxygen , hydrogen and what not , and behold !sx life , and thought , and love , and art and all the rest of man's physical , mental and spiritual life .sx Here is a fact the fact of correspondence which is truly startling .sx It causes a question in regard to the nature of the whole cosmos .sx Is it all thought , all mind , all life ?sx At least these things interfuse it in such a way that what we call life corresponds with what we call not-life .sx Things endure also .sx Viewed for the first time , or for the millionth , with fresh eyes , here is material for the mind and for the religious consciousness .sx Briefly , let me pledge my conviction .sx The endurance which I witness about me , in which I participate so intimately , on which I rely for indeed the universe goes on , constant to its own inner nature , and ordered existence and thought is therefore possible whence or how does it come about ?sx The mind is impressed by the fact .sx If it goes on to the ad-mission of religion it will say , " Things endure , because God endures .sx He is the spirit of Courage which actuates all things .sx They exist because He wills them to exist and has Courage to continue to will them !sx "