About the Book
Excerpt from The Drama of the Spiritual Life: A Study of Religious, Experience and Ideals It may be that the Day of the Lord is at hand, when all outward symbols of the present-day civilization are about to perish and not a wrack be left behind; when men shall cry on every side Who shall show us any good and Peace, peace, when there is no peace! Bold, imaginative thinkers, like H. G. Wells, for example, believe to find in science some permanent value, and some message of freedom, peace, and hope for man's troubled spirit. Science, like ethics, though from a different stand point, believes in the infinite possibilities of man and in the great adventure before him and science, like religion, holds to man's relations to an undiscovered country, - an nu seen world. But the new world of science is in part still a world man-made, and in part a world belonging to the old natural order, and inevitably we ask, can such a value, which is after all of our finite world, be an eternal value? It is otherwise with the new world which religion holds to. The new world of religion belongs to an order which we may call a transformed, or supernatural order, yet this order, as we shall see, is still in close touch with the tem poral order, and it is, I believe, an order which is completely rational. It is not religion itself, then, which is a failure, but man's own thinking about it; and his own attitude, in that he does not practise what he really sees and experiences. The present war may serve as a chastening experience to make man see again the need of the quickening of the re ligious spirit, and may reveal to him that while old formulas, old symbols and creeds may need to be re-phrased to the lights and perfections of a new dawn, in religion is still to be found man's perennial, healing spring of strength and hope both for the way of his every-day life, and in the great crises of the individual life, as well as in the life of nations. At the present hour many persons are prophesying that when the war in Europe is finally over there will follow, out of man's sense of his own weakness and his great need, a revival of religion. What we want to be sure of is - and this is in man's power - that this religious revival, when it comes, shall be a re-awakening of a religious spirit that is truly spiritual, that is, profoundly ethical. Man, in his sense of weakness and need, is so prone to fly to some magic making substitute for religion, no matter how irrational it may be. A spiritual religion requires effort, self-control, concentration, reflection, determination of the will, and these men are not ready to give. If it seems to us that this con scious thirst for the deep springs of the spiritual life is that of which our own age stands most in need, doubtless this has been felt to be the fundamental lack in every age. For man is, after all, so little spiritual. He has as yet hardly broken loose from nature. He is like a statue only just emerging from the rough block. His wings have hardly begun to grow. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
