RELIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP AS THE CULMINATING SOCIAL INSTITUTION  
In this chapter I shall undertake to sketch the plan of a religious society as determined by the spiritual ideal herein set forth. The religious society is the last term in the series of social institutions, and its peculiar office is to furnish the principle for the successive transformation of the entire series. It is to be the laboratory in which the ideal of the spiritual universe is created and constantly recreated, the womb in which the spiritual life is conceived. No single religious society can adequately fulfill this purpose. The spiritual ideal itself must necessarily be conceived differently by different minds; but the great general purpose will be the same, despite variations in shades of meaning and points of view.
 
The fellowship of the religious society must be based on the voluntary principle; membership must be a matter of free choice.100 In antiquity the boundaries of342 the political and religious organizations coincided. The citizen was under obligations as a part of his civic duty to worship the divinities of the state. In modern times a state church is still maintained in some countries and supported out of the public funds, while dissenting and nonconformist bodies exist more or less on sufferance at its side. But this arrangement is harmful, especially so to those whom it seems to favor. Erastianism paralyzes religious spontaneity. The state, it is true, is profoundly interested in the flourishing of ethical idealism, and in the constant rebirth in its midst of spiritual ideals. But it is not competent to determine what the character of these ideals shall be. The moment they cease to be freely produced they lose their life-giving power. The state within limits may enforce actions; it may not even attempt to enforce beliefs.
 
On the other hand, the “secularization of the state” has given rise to the deplorable impression that the state exists only for so-called secular purposes, and has stripped the idea of the state of the lofty attributes with which the greatest thinkers of antiquity had clothed it. It is the function of the religious society, dwelling uncoerced in the midst of the state, to reinvest the state with the sacred character that belongs to it. I do not of course intend to exalt the state after the manner of343 Hegel, as if it were a kind of earthly god or to set it up as an object of religious or quasi-religious devotion. The object of religious devotion is the infinite holy community, the spiritual universe. The function of the religious society is to generate the ideal of the infinite holy community, of the spiritual universe. The family, the vocation, the nation, are sub-groups of this, lesser entities. Even mankind itself is but a province of the ideal spiritual commonwealth that extends beyond it. To concentrate worship upon the state or nation as some propose, would be to usurp for the part the piety that belongs to the whole.
 
In describing a religious society three main aspects are to be borne in mind:
 
The teaching, the organization, the worship.
 
A. The Teaching
 
In the religious society as here conceived there is to be worked out a body of doctrine, and there is to be a body of specially designated teachers. An ethico-religious society cannot ignore or dispense with a general philosophy of life and statements of belief. It cannot restrict itself to encouraging practical morality without regard to what are called metaphysical subtleties. A moral society of this kind would soon become ossified. On the contrary, an ethico-religious society should excel in the fertility with which it gives rise to new metaphysical constructions and original formulations of ethical faith. The will cannot be divorced from the intellect. The active volitional life cannot be successfully stimu344lated and guided without the assistance of the mind as well as of the imagination.
 
But the relation between philosophy and formulas of belief on the one hand and volitional experience on the other should be the reverse of what it has been in the past. Here there must be a new departure. The doctrine, the formulations, whatever they may be, must not be dogmatic but flexible. Growing originally out of ethical experience, they must ever prove themselves apt to enlarge and deepen ethical experience. By this test they will be judged and they must therefore ever be subject to revision and correction. Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience. But then it claimed for itself eternal validity, compressing the spiritual life within its mold, and checking further development. The body of doctrine which I desire and foresee will likewise be an interpretation of ethical experience, intended to make explicit the fundamental principles implicit in ethical experience, and thereby clarifying it, and assisting its further unfolding. But it is not and should never be allowed to become dogmatic. The difference, I take it, is plain: in the one case experience contracted in procrustean fashion into a rigid formula, in the other case an elastic formula adapted to and subordinated to the experience.
 
Thus much for the body of teachings. There should also be a body of teachers. A teacher in an ethico-religious society will retain something of the character of his predecessors—priest, prophet, rabbi, pastor. The priest is the mediator of grace; the prophet is the seer345 of visions; the rabbi is learned in the Divine law, and the pastor is the helper of the individual in securing his individual salvation. But these functions will now be seen in an altered light, and will be radically modified in their exercise. The magical attribute of the priest disappears. The confident prediction of future events, based on the assumption that the moral order is to be completely realized in human society, has ceased to be convincing. The Divine law is no longer identical with the Law revealed in the Scriptures and their commentaries, and the salvation of the individual is to be accomplished by other means.
 
The religious teacher of the new kind is to resemble his predecessors in being a specialist. The word specialist in this connection may, perhaps, awaken misgivings, and these must be removed. He is not a specialist in the sense of having a conscience unlike that of others, or in being the keeper of other men’s consciences. Nor shall he impose his philosophy of life or his belief authoritatively, but propose it suggestively. His best results will be gained if he succeeds in so stimulating those whom he influences that they will attain an individualized spiritual outlook of their own, consonant with their own individual nature and need. But specialists of this kind are indispensable. The generality of men have neither the time nor the mental equipment to think out the larger problems of life without assistance, and the attempt on their part to do so leads to crudities and eccentricities of which one meets nowadays with many pathetic examples among those who have severed their connection with the traditional faiths, and have346 tried in their groping fashion to invent a metaphysic or a creed of their own.101
 
The preparation of the ethical teacher for his special task consists in making himself thoroughly acquainted with the great religious systems of the past, in which much that is of permanent spiritual value is enshrined.102 He is to fit himself to revitalize what is vital, not to repristinate what is obsolete. There is required of him a first-hand knowledge of the great ethical systems, and of their philosophical backgrounds: furthermore acquaintance, so far as it is as yet accessible, with the moral history of mankind, as distinguished from the history of ethical thinking; in addition, he should intensively study the economic, social and political problems of the time from the ethical point of view, and the psychology both of individual and national character, so far as that fascinating and difficult subject has been opened up by competent writers. Apprenticeship in the social reform movements of the day, direct touch with the inner life of people, on its healthful as well as on its sick side, is also presupposed.
 
347
 
Since no single person can be adequately prepared in these various subjects, and since a variety of gifts and talents is demanded, it follows that the teaching function shall be exercised by a body or group of teachers, not by a single pastor at whose feet the congregation are supposed to sit. Some of the persons engaged in this work will excel as public speakers, others as writers, others as teachers of the young, others as leaders of vocational groups. But all these different functionaries must learn to work, not only in harmony, but in organic, reciprocal support, themselves illustrating in their group life the spiritual relation, the knowledge and the practice of which they are to carry out into the world. The guild or group idea must be applied to the religious teachers of the future.
 
B. The Organization
 
Every religion exhibits a certain form of organization peculiar to itself and derived from its controlling idea. The organization of the Buddhist fellowship is dependent on the Buddhist ideal of preparation for absorption in Nirvana. The constitution of the Jewish synagogue reflects the conception of the relation of the Chosen People, as an élite corps of the divinity. The organization of the Christian church is characterized by its bifurcation into an ecclesia militans and an ecclesia triumphans, and further by the idea of incorporation into the body of Christ, a difficult mystical conception as of a typical divine individual including within his body a multitude of other individuals.
 
............