Ebook How Religion Arises

Yet how few do their own thinking! Millions hire it done to suit their taste but in doing so they sell their birthright, and forfeit what they might be. What I want is not in struction, but provocation, said Emerson. 'what any mind wants is suggestion, frequent stirring up. Clear thinking is of all importance; yet how little of it is done! From ab sence Of this, what worlds of confusion! And confusion is the evil of evils. Religion, the commonest, is almost the least clear of our ideas. What everybody knows nobody knows. What is more an every-day affair? Yet who can define it? We all talk about Christianity much of the time; yet what is Christianity? One runs a mortal risk of dethroning a man's faith by the confusion one puts him to in asking him to define it. One principal reason of so little faith is so little effort on the part of the faithless to express what they have. Better try and mistake than not try at all. Bacon was wise when he said, Truth emerges sooner from mistake than confusion. Then another class seem to abound in faith, but analysis shows it to be only credulity. It has its basis on nothing firmer than unreasoned and unreasonable authority. It is of the sort described by the boy in Sunday-school, who, on being asked what faith was, replied, It is being perfectly sure of a thing when you have nothing to back it up.