Jehovah, Zeus, Hercules, Osiris, Isis, Brahma, Buddha, Manito, Allah, Odin—
They were alive and did the work of their days,
The priests revered, the bloody rites, the mummeries—how credulous! how childlike and simple!
Yet each as far advanced as it could be, considering what had preceded it.

And I do not blame them for doing what they have done, and are doing,
They have done the work that was for them, and that could not be done without them,
Every one the needed representative of its truth,
Or of something needed as much as truth,
Often conserving all there was of justice, art, literature, and good manners.

All forms of religion, any age, any land, are but mediums, temporary yet necessary, fitted to the lower mass-ranges of perception of the human race—part of its infant school. Each one means exactly the state of development of the people, promoting religious and moral action to the fullest degree of which the humanity there under the circumstances was capable. The very fact that a religion exists is proof that the people are ready for it. (As long as there are Presbyterians, Presbyterians ought to be.)

The fading religions and priests, all over the world, leaving their memories and inheritances—the cruelties of creeds—the sectarian, church, and doctrinal follies, crimes, fanaticisms, aggregate and individual, so rife all through history—taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more—are proofs of the radicalness and universality of the indestructible element of humanity’s religion, and are the other side of it—just as disease proves health, and is the other side of it.

The divine ideas—
Of spirituality, of another sphere of existence, of the immortal soul of the woman and the man, of conscience and perfect justice and goodness—
Amid vain forms and baubles,
Amid vermin and gnawing rust,
Overlaid with stifling and suffocating things,
With corpses piled over them, smothered, as subterranean fire,
Invisible yet impossible to die,
Seeing that they are all necessary to the scheme, all divine facts,
Serenely preserved through millennia of years,
Redeemed, through the ages, the continents, by that one underlying fervor, out of which wayward forms arose.

I stand silent and admirable before the movements of the great soul of humanity in all lands, in every age,
I applaud them that they have done so well.
For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,
For us those beacons burn through all the nights,
All the best experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here,
Bearing the freight so dear—dearer than pride—dearer than love—
Doing the great service of suggesting something beyond all ostents to the human mind—the greatest service of all,
And with many traditions here transmitted to us,
To me, to you, whoever you are,
To illumine our own selfhood, and its experiences.

Removed as we are from Greece, Egypt, etc., we still find engrafted today on our own affairs, all that is valuable belongs to them,
Change the form, but the substance always remains.
So don’t be too severe on old religious delusions—or modern ones either,
From grand points of view, ascending high enough, we dare not find fault with any of them.

But I am no shallowpate to go about singing them above the rest and deferring to them—
They did not become great by singing and deferring,
Moreover they bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have to rise and fly and sing for themselves;
Every one, without exception, prepares the way for a higher,
Must, in due time, give way to a higher and far different (even if inclusive of the former)—
The  religions, the new ones arising out of the old ones, each fit for its time and land,
Yet helplessly withdrawing in due time, giving place to the more needed one that must succeed it.
The certain evolution of (not ecclesiasticism but) religion, through all stages and happenings, is the inevitable development of humanity—
They have arrived at that—by-and-by they will pass on farther;
In this age or any age, it is a study which has to be begun by the age for itself. 

The people must begin to learn that religion is something far, far different from what they supposed,
Religion is not the conventional church, by any means, but rests on something deeper.
Any one religion is just as good as another, and any religion is better than none,
The developed soul passes through one or all of them, to the clear atmosphere above them,
There all meet—
Jew meets Hindu, and Persian and Greek and Asiatic and European and American are joined,
Previous distinctions are lost.

So religion is too important to be consigned any longer to the churches—Saint this, or Saint that—I believe in saints if they’re far enough off; I demand something far more real. All the sects, churches, creeds, pews, sermons, observances, Sundays, etc., have nothing to do with real religion, which escapes independent of them, and now turning, looks upon them with derision, as upon things strange and foreign to itself.
Epictetus says: “Do not let yourself be wrapt by phantasms”—and we must not. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. What is called such, even accepting the most florid and large description of it, is but one little item in the sum of that boundless account which a man should be always balancing with his own soul.

I say in the present age, for developed people, the churches are full of mummeries, disgraceful. The mummery of the churches in which none believes but all agree to countenance, with secret sarcasm and denial in their hearts, is what stands most in the way of a real athletic and fit religion. Have done with mummeries, for the soul of modern times has passed on and left them far, far behind.

People often speak of me as if I was very new—original,
But I did not come to reveal new things,
I don’t so much come announcing new things as resuming the correct perspective on old things.
I know the traditions help me well,
Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
How could I be developed even so far, and talk with decision today, beginning the study of these things, without all those traditions? 

But I take all the old forms and faiths and remake them in conformity with the modern spirit.
The philosophy of Greece taught normality and the beauty of life. Christianity teaches how to endure illness and death. I have wonder’d whether a third philosophy fusing both, and doing full justice to both, might not be outlined.
Our time demands the fuller recognition of democracy—the ensemble; these have hardly been recognized at all in the old theology. The church lags superfluous, out of touch entirely with the great struggles of contemporary humanity.

It is time the men be sternly recalled to themselves, and the women also,
Men make churches; men may destroy churches,
I can easily build as good, and so can you.

NEXT: THE NEW RELIGION