Part 5

SCIENCE is incredulous of any relation between religion and natural laws. Yet it is true now as said thirty centuries ago that--

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding have they who keep his commandments.”

From the Ten Commandments on, all religions have been the best efforts of their founders and supporters to put man in accord with his environment. This is their essence, though too frequently obscured by the political, theological, and social aspects given them.

While some religions are much better than others, every man gets as {56} good a religion and as much of it as he has capacity for. Nothing has been more clearly demonstrated by thousands of years of strenuous missionary effort than this fact.

Furthermore, any religion is better than none.

“For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can’t be wrong, whose life is in the right”

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RELIGION, in its primary sense of something to bind back, to bind fast, is a force which restrains a {57} man from acts temporarily attractive but eventually hurtful to himself and others.

Some religions, like the Hebrew, promise in addition to spiritual benefits, long life, worldly success, peace, happiness, and blessings to the children, even to the third and fourth generations.

The Brahmin and Buddhist promise a Nirvana--a dreamless rest from the troubles of life.

The Christian and Mahometan promise an eternity of ineffable bliss.

All of these are based upon the elements of moral science and, at least, {58} give a man a fairly reliable sailing chart for the voyage of life.

Defective as many of them may be, they are the best that human intelligence has so far produced.

Next in order but far inferior in saving power are statute laws and social ethics.

All these influences are potent in that broad, middle ground which separates the best from the worst. They “pluck brands from the burning.”

By their means the less aberrant are brought into nearer conformity with Nature’s stern requirements.

But for the hopeless defectives,--the misfits in her tireless productiveness {59} --religion, laws, and society are alike weaker than woman’s tears.

They themselves sharpen the scythe of the Grim Reaper who brings the only remedy. {60}