LECTURE 03: THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and

most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief

that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in

harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment

are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call

your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an

attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our

attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due

to the “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to

exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may

be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In

either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to

things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to

sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may

make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently

more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of

making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is

based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a

weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.

The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they

worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for

example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of

their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by

way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force

of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine

personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in

general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in

the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.

But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,

religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.

God’s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his

absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri‐unity, the various

mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,

etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian

believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible

images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all

religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation

of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and

abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the

believer’s subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.

Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,

the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.

These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our

conceptions always require a sense‐content to work with, and as the words

“soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense‐content whatever,

it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any

significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our

practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;

consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as

if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a

genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_...