RELIGION FOR THE NEW AGE
BY JOHN HERMAN RANDALL
Address delivered by John Herman Randall of New York City, at Chicago, April 30, 1928.
I APPRECIATE very keenly the privilege of meeting with you tonight and I am especially glad of this opportunity because of my real and deep sympathy with the great message that fell from the lips of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and that shone through His daily life. One of the great experiences of my life came at the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to this country in 1912, when I was privileged to meet Him personally in New York, and when He did me the very great honor of speaking at the Sunday Service in my church in that city.
I have been asked tonight, to speak to you, and that briefly, on the subject: “Religion for the New Age.”
It may be that some of us will say, “Why for the ‘new age’? Is not religion the same, yesterday, today and forever?” There is a sense, of course, in which this is true. The demand of religion in every age may be broadly stated as the demand for the good life, and yet, there is another sense in which each age makes its own peculiar demands upon religion.
The fact is that we have come into a new age today; how new, very few of us, I think, as yet begin to appreciate or understand. This means, perhaps, as never before, that there must come a religion that shall be adequate to the great pressing demands of this age. Now it is an open secret today among religious leaders here and throughout Christendom, that there is something wrong with our religious life as a people.
I have sat in many conferences with such leaders, and have heard the situation presented from various viewpoints. I have heard the blame for the present lack of interest in organized religion laid first on this cause, and then on that; the simple fact remains that whatever the causes may be, religion in its outward and organized manifestations today, in the judgment of its own leaders and representatives, is in a rather serious plight.
I do not want to take your time tonight in attempting to analyze the religious situation as we see it throughout Christendom, or throughout other parts of the world. I want, rather, to spend our time in suggesting some of the needs of religion that are demanded—more than that—that are required—imperatively required—by this new and wonderful age into which we have come.
In the first place, the religion for this new age must, in my judgment, be a religion whose viewpoint is universal rather than sectarian. We have come into an age in which the great world about us—the world of politics, the world of economic life, the world of our general social life—is reaching out more or less vaguely to be sure, and yet very sincerely, after some kind of unity that has never yet existed in the life of man.
Our best political leaders today are recognizing the fact that, in the kind of world in which we now live, we must discover the pathway that shall lead us eventually into a family of nations, where nations shall cooperate one with the other; where nations will no longer be content each to live its own life for its own sake, because of its own selfish interest; but when, in co-operation, the nations of men shall learn how to live together and work together for the largest good and highest development and happiness of all humanity.
We have come into a kind of world where
we are bound together economically by a
thousand-and—one ties that had no existence
a century ago, and to those who understand
these relations which, today, bind nation to
nation, people to people—these relations have
come to involve us all in various ways
so[Page 318]
that our interests today
are mutual, and cannot, in the nature of things,
be otherwise. The leaders in the world of finance,
and in the world of economics, know full
well that our economic world is fast becoming
knit together into one. In our
social life, we know the spirit that is
everywhere seeking to find expression through
every group is the “get-together-spirit.”
The bringing of men in every community
into various luncheon groups, the efforts to
break down old barriers of ignorance and
prejudice, the seeking in every community
new avenues of co-operation that shall lead
to the fullest development of that community’s
life—all these things are characteristic of
our age. Partisanship and sectarianship in
all these various phases of human life
are gradually being replaced today by a better
understanding and a truer sympathy. They
still exist, to be sure, but they exist as the
waning tide, not as the waxing tide. They
exist as something that belongs to a past
that is gone. And the new spirit that strives
for unity and co-operation, is the rising
spirit everywhere, finding expression today.
In an age like this, what possible place can there be for a sectarian religion, when in politics, economics, and our social life generally, and in all their relations as particular groups, men are striving to find through their philosophy a closer co-operation?
How can religion play any real part in such a world until religion has first discovered the pathway to unity within itself? And I am very sure that it is the conviction of the real religious leaders of today when I say that they are confident that one of the great causes of the weakness of organized religion in the world, is due to the fact that it is still striving to maintain its sectarian divisions, to keep intact its sectarian barriers, in spite of the spirit of the age that is moving toward closer unity, striving to perpetuate the differences of the past.
Perhaps some of you are asking “Just what is the difference between universal and sectarian religion?” The spirit of sectarianism is the spirit that says, “You must all come in with us. We must include you within ourselves.” And the spirit of universal religion is the spirit that says, “We will go out to all of you. We want to understand and appreciate what religion means to you.” The spirit of sectarianism in religion is the spirit that lays emphasis upon “our” name, “our” organization, “our” leaders. The universal spirit in religion is the spirit that reverences and recognizes all great prophets of God and sees in every one of these prophets, past and present, the Manifestation of the life and spirit of the Living God. The spirit of sectarianism in religion is the spirit that says, “You must come to think as we think and believe as we believe, and you must use our particular phraseology.” And the spirit of universal religion is the spirit that says, “God hath not left Himself without a witness among any people,” and every man has the right to express his religious beliefs in his own way.
There are a thousand different pathway that lead to God. Men are traveling by these different pathways and through different experiences and with different temperaments. Why should we all think alike and believe just the same things, or speak the same language?
In an age like ours, it is this universal spirit that must find expression more and more fully in the religious life of man, and it is going to drive out of religion, as it is eliminating from these other fields of human life and activity, all of that spirit that is now partisan and sectarian and narrow and divisive.
I doubt if anyone of us here today, has even begun to dream of the fullness, breadth and largeness of what universal religion might be in this world. I doubt if even the best of us can today even visualize the mighty sweep of power that could come into the life of men when religion dares to translate itself into universal terms.
And so this is one of the first characteristics of religion for this new age. It will gain a universal viewpoint, and will no longer cling to the outworn, inadequate, obsolete, sectarian viewpoint.
A second characteristic of the religion for
the new age will be this: religion will be
translated into social rather than into purely
individualistic terms. It is the vision of a
world transformed that religion needs to
gain today. We realize how many
pulpits[Page 319]
of the land are
still voicing the old idea
coming down through the Middle Ages and
later on voiced by the leaders of Protestantism,
that this world of ours, with all its
beauty, wonder and complex relationships,
belongs to the Devil, and that our business,
as religions or churches, is to save as many
individuals as we can out of this wicked
world, and see them safely through to some
distant haven of bliss, while the world itself
rumbles on to destruction.
We know how many pulpits are still voicing this old idea and have never yet caught the vision that this is God’s world and always has been, and that our business in our religious life is not to save our own individual souls, but to save the world—and that means the world of politics, the world of our economic life, the world of social relationships—the whole world in which men live, and move, and have their being every day.
This is a comparatively recent idea that has dawned upon the horizon of religion for, from the beginning in our Christianity, at least, religion has been translated into individualistic terms. It existed for the sake of saving souls. It did not reach out to the great society of which the souls are integral parts. But we see today, very clearly, that there is no possible way of saving our own souls except as we lose all thought of our individual salvation in the great task of saving society itself. We are beginning to see today that our great mission in the world, religiously, is to transform society from its center to its circumference, that God is simply waiting for us to catch the vision that has come to the world through the great prophets, past and present, and then translate it into actual living terms.
I remember, in the old church where I was brought up as a boy, a certain elderly deacon who used to pray at every prayer meeting, and invariably he used these words in the course of his petition: “O Lord,” he would say, “How long must we wait before Thou beginnest to work?” Well, we have been waiting a pretty long time in the idea that when God got good-and-ready He was going to save the world if it was ever going to be done, and we have been so absorbed and engrossed in saving our own little souls that we have neglected the great task God has entrusted to our care.
Now we are coming to see that God has been waiting for us to work, and that the way in which God works in this world of ours is through men and women who have caught the vision and who are possessed of the spirit of consecration and who are willing and ready to forget themselves in their great task of transforming and saving society.
So I am very sure that in this new age into which we have come, a second characteristic of religion will be that it will be translated into social rather than into individualistic terms. Stop and think for a moment of the new civilization spreading throughout the world—our industrial civilization. The supreme question that we are confronted with today, is this: “Is man to be the master of the things which his brain and hand have conjured up, or is he to be their slave?” Man is beginning to be afraid of these things which he has discovered and invented. I wonder if you ever stopped to think why he is beginning to be afraid. The pyramid we marvel at because it is something monumental; the temple we stand in reverence before, because of its beauty; but science is the great factor in today’s life, out of which has come our industrial civilization; and we do not think of science in terms of the monumental or of beauty. Science is a function of man’s life. Thoughtful men are beginning to see that what the machine really means is an extension of man’s power to do things. And he is beginning to be fearful lest this tremendous power which the machine has added to his life and his hand, is a power that has gotten beyond his control.
When we talk about religion serving society, we mean today primarily nothing less than this: The religion of the new age must be a religion that somehow will show man the way to become the master and not the victim of these mighty engines of power which he has created, that will enable man to make all this ‘new knowledge” tend toward constructive and not destructive ends, toward the enrichment of the human personality and the ennobling of society.
A third characteristic of religion for
the[Page 320]
new age is this: It
will be, I think, a religion translated
into spiritual, rather than into theological terms.
As We look back over
the history of religion in the life of man,
we see that there has been a slow yet sure
evolution from the ritualistic stage into
what we call the theological stage, the
controversial stage, and the next period will
come when religion moves on into its spiritual
stage.
Primitive man, with his little pile of sticks and stones before which he bowed with certain incantations, made religion a ritualistic thing at the outset. Later on we find as man’s brain develops, as his intellect expands, he begins to translate religion into intellectual terms. This is the age of the great creed-makers—the age when the dogmas of Christianity came into existence. Then follows that long period of theological controversy when one creed was pitted against the other, when one set of theologians waged war against another. We have seen, within these very days in which we live, the old controversies waged again between fundamentalists and modernists that is, between those who hold certain intellectual views about the Bible and about God and about these various subjects of religion, and those who hold somewhat different views.
But now we are coming to a period, not when all rituals will be abandoned entirely, nor when there will be no place for reasoning, philosophical theologians; people who think at all will always have some philosophy of life that will constitute for them a theology; but we are coming to see that back of the ritual, back of all theology or the things you believe, lies the real soul of religion after all—in the spirit, that animates the heart and pervades the life of the individual.
These old dogmas that have survived from the creeds of earlier centuries down until today, have lost their appeal for intelligent minds, not because they did not, at the outset, enshrine certain great truths, but simply because the language in which these doctrines are framed and the very conceptions of the universe and of life upon which these formulas are based, no longer harmonize with reality as we understand it today.
As someone has put it, the trouble with these theologies of the past which are still believed and taught in so many organizations of religion is this: "That the living dogmas of the past have become the dead dogmas of the living.” I do not believe in this new age into which we have come that we are going to spend much time in fashioning new theologies in the sense in which the old creed makers created theologies, but what I do see more and more apparent, is the recognition on the part of men everywhere, that the real test of one’s religion lies not in what one believes or how one worships, but in the principles that guide and the spirit that animates one's daily life. And I am very sure that a religion that is universal in its outlook will be also a religion in which the spirit of one’s life will play the dominant and the controlling part. We will not ask a man whom he follows, or where he worships, or what he believes, but as we dwell with him and watch him in his relations to his fellows, as we look into his eyes, and listen to his speech, we will know of a verity, whether the real essence of religion dwells in him or no.
Still another characteristic of the religion of this new age will be found in the fact that the spirit which is the essence and soul of religion is ever and always the spirit that seeks for unity, the spirit that knows and realizes unity. I think one of the greatest gains in this century is the fact that we are coming to see that the spirit of religion is, in the nature of things, nothing less than this: Can we realize our oneness as individual men and women with all who live and struggle and aspire everywhere? Can we enter into the consciousness that we are, all of us, black, white, red, yellow, or brown, members together of the living body of humanity? Are you and I in that frame of mind so that we can feel, and feel habitually, that the same great infinite life flows in all our veins, wells up in every one of us as consciousness, is manifested in each individual the whole world round as a differentiation of the great life of the Living God?
For all these centuries, we have been professing to believe that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men that dwell on
[Page 321]
Group of Bahá’ís in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
Bahá’ís of Rostock, Germany.
[Page 322]
the face of the earth,” but
how many of us have ever really believed
that statement? For all these centuries
we have professed to
accept the great word of Jesus as He looked
out upon the human race and human society
and saw that all men were brothers, but
how many of us have ever yet realized the
truth of His great teaching?
It is one thing to join a church or a religious organization that stands for the ideals of brotherhood——it is one thing to join a lodge whose ideals are those of brotherhood, but it is a vastly different thing to feel brotherliness in one’s own heart and to feel it habitually, and to feel it for all men and women. And yet, if I mistake not, we are coming into an age where the only final test of any man’s religion will be found in just the degree that he does feel brotherliness and feel it habitually and give expression to it daily in all manifold relations to his fellows.
Another characteristic of this religion for the new age, I am very sure, will be this: It will be a religion which, on its intellectual side, is in harmony with the accepted findings of modern science and philosophy. There can be no real divorce between science and religion in a world in which the source of all truth of necessity is one. And the religion for this new age must somehow discover the method by means of which it shall be able to interpret the moral and spiritual values of man’s daily life in harmony with these new conceptions of science and philosophy.
What we need today is a conception of religion that shall “satisfy the soul of the saint, without at the same time insulting the intelligence of the scholar.” What we need today is a religion that shall base itself on the facts of science, not necessarily of all theories, and then make clear the bearing and significance of these great scientific facts for the moral and spiritual life of man.
I know there are those today, as in every day, who have prophesied a gradual disappearance of religion from the world. There are many today who tell us that religion has been outgrown and that science henceforth is to take its place. But these people leave out one tremendously vital and fundamental thing. They forget, that constituted as he is, man will never be satisfied to live in a universe of uninterpreted facts, and the business of religion is not to contradict or deny the facts of science wherever they exist, but rather, reverently and gratefully to accept these facts, and then to interpret them for us in terms of man’s moral and spiritual aspirations.
One more characteristic of this religion for the new age will be this: It will be a religion that finds the way to make love operative in human life. When we look back over the centuries, and realize how the gospel of love in one form or another has been preached from countless places of worship, when we realize that every religion from the beginning of time, has had as its central teaching, this great gospel of love, do we not begin to wonder why it is that all of the preaching and teaching of love has seemingly been so ineffective of the life of the world or of mankind as a whole? And if I were to give one reason why, it seems to me to be found in this fact: That in our emphasis upon the need of love in human life, we have not always placed an equal emphasis upon the need for knowledge and intelligence.
I believe if the great God could speak to us in actual words today, the thing that He would say more clearly than anything else, would be this: “It is not by knowledge alone, it is not by love alone, but by knowledge plus love”—intelligence, permeated and suffused with the spirit of love —that the world of which we are a part will be redeemed and transformed—until at length the unity which is the very essence of God’s life will become realized in the life of His children.
I heard the other day, of an old man who
said to a friend of his: “How would I feel,
when I die and go to heaven, if somebody
would say to me there: ‘My, but you have
been living in a wonderful period of human
history, in the midst of such great and
critical events. What marvelous changes
have been taking place while you have been
there upon the earth!’” And the old man
said, “How would I feel if I should have to
turn to my friend in heaven and say, ‘What
changes do you mean?’ I did not
realize[Page 323]
I was living in a
great period of human history.”
I cannot think of any fate that would be more tragic for any one of us, than to go through life in this age so wonderful, so full of the new, creative spirit—an age in which the great forces making for unity and understanding and co-operation in the life of man are present as never before in all the past, and to be unmindful of it all; unconscious of its deep significance! To go through life in such an age and play no real part in helping to bring the new world to birth, is the supreme tragedy.
If I mistake not, the religion for the new age that I have thus characterized is of the very essence of religion as it was proclaimed and lived by Bahá’u’lláh. In my own language, I have simply tried to give expression to the ideals and principles for which I believe you, my friends, are trying to stand. May you become increasingly the living embodiment of the spirit of the new age.
I am reminded of a story by Mr. H. G. Wells, where he tells of a group of students at Oxford University. They used to get together two evenings a week in each other’s rooms and discuss plans for the greater England that might one day be. Finally they finished their studies, and came up to London, and the chief character of the story finds no opportunity at once to wield any real influence, to do any great work, for the England he loves. For a time he does hack writing for various journals and newspapers. Ten years pass by and then, at last, his opportunity comes. He stands for Parliament and is elected. And, on the night that he takes his seat, after the ceremonies are over, he tears himself away from the congratulations of his friends, turns his back on the old historic building, and wanders out along the Thames embankment alone.
As he walks alone in the midnight hour, a deep sense of his great opportunity comes over him. At last his dream is realized. As a member of this great historic Parliament, his voice will count and his influence will have weight, and he can at last play some real part in fashioning the policies of the nobler England to be. Then there follows on this, a consciousness of the greatness of his responsibility, and he feels weighted down to the very earth. He turns his eyes at length toward the quiet, shining stars and just breathes forth this prayer: “O God, break me, disgrace me, torment me, destroy me as Thou wilt, only save me from self-complacency, from little interests, and little successes, and the life that passes like the shadow of a dream.”
My friends, in this great hour of human history, when God’s prophets are speaking to us today of that unity and understanding, and of the spirit of co-operation which must be realized in the life of man in the new kind of world into which we have come, is there any one prayer we need to pray more often than this: “God, save me from self-complacency, from little interests and little successes, and the life that passes like the shadow of a dream”?
