S. Laing

Byron’s lines—Carnegie’s description—Parsee nature-worship—English Sunday—The sermon—Appeals to reason misplaced—Music better than words—The Mass—Zoroastrianism brings religion into daily life—Sanitation—Zoroastrian prayer—Religion of the future—Sermons in stones and good in everything.

A shrewd Scotch-American ironmaster—Andrew Carnegie—in an interesting and instructive record of experiences during a voyage round the world, gives the following description of the worship of the modern Parsees, as actually witnessed by him at Bombay:—

‘This evening we were surprised to see, as we strolled along the beach, more Parsees than ever before, and more Parsee ladies richly dressed, all wending their way towards the sea. It was the first of the new moon, a period sacred to these worshippers of the elements; and here on the shore of the ocean, as the sun was sinking in the sea, and the slender silver thread of the crescent moon was faintly shining on the horizon, they congregated to perform their religious rites.

‘Fire was there in its grandest form, the setting sun, and water in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean outstretched before them. The earth was under their feet, and wafted across the sea the air came laden with the perfumes of “Araby the blest.” Surely no time or place could be more fitly chosen than this for lifting up the soul to the realms beyond sense. I could not but participate with these worshippers in what was so grandly beautiful. There was no music save the solemn moan of the waves as they broke into foam on the beach. But where shall we find so mighty an organ, or so grand an anthem?

‘How inexpressibly sublime the scene appeared to me, and how insignificant and unworthy of the unknown seemed even our cathedrals “made with human hands,” when compared with this looking up through nature unto nature’s God! I stood and drank in the serene happiness which seemed to fill the air. I have seen many modes and forms of worship—some disgusting, others saddening, a few elevating when the organ pealed forth its tones, but all poor in comparison with this. Nor do I ever expect in all my life to witness a religious ceremony which will so powerfully affect me as that of the Parsees on the beach at Bombay.’

I say Amen with all my heart to Mr. Carnegie. Here is an ideal religious ceremony combining all that is most true, most touching, and most sublime, in the attitude of man towards the Great Unknown. Compare it with the routine of an ordinary English Sunday, and how poor and prosaic does the latter appear! There is nothing which seems to me to have fallen more completely out of harmony with its existing environment than our traditional form of church service. The sermon has been killed by the press and has become an anachronism. There was a time when sermons like those of Latimer and John Knox were living realities; they dealt with all the burning political and personal questions of the day, and to a great extent did the work now done by platform speeches and leading articles. If there are national dangers to be denounced, national shortcomings to be pointed out, iniquity in high places to be rebuked, we look to our daily newspaper, and not to our weekly sermon. The sermon has in a great majority of cases become a sort of schoolboy theme, in which traditional assumptions and conventional phrases are ground out, with as little soul or idea behind them as in the Thibetan praying-mill. In the course of a long life I have gained innumerable ideas and experienced innumerable influences, from contact with the world, with fellow-men, and with books; but although I have heard a good many sermons, I cannot honestly say that I ever got an idea or an influence from one of them which made me wiser or better, or different in any respect from what I should have been if I had slept through them. And this from no fault of the preachers. I have heard many who gave me the impression that they were good men, and a few who impressed me as being able and liberal-minded men—nor do I know that, under the conditions in which they are placed, I could have done any better myself. But they were dancing in fetters, and so tied down by conventionalities that it was simply impossible for them to depart from the paths of a decorous routine.

The fact is that the whole point of view of our religious services, especially in Protestant countries, has become a mistaken one. It is far too much an appeal to the intellect and to abstract dogmas, and too little, one to the realities of actual life and to the vague emotions and aspirations which constitute the proper field of religion. In the great reaction of the Reformation it was perhaps inevitable that an appeal should be made to reason against the abuses of an infallible Church; and as long as the literal inspiration of the Bible and other theological premises were held to be undoubted axioms by the whole Christian world, there might be a certain interest in hearing them repeated over and over again in becoming language, and in listening to sermons which explained shortly conclusions which might be drawn from these admitted axioms. But this is no longer the case. It is impossible to touch the merest fringe of the questions now raised by the intellectual side of religion in discourses of half an hour’s length; even if the preacher were perfectly free, and not hampered by the fear of scandalising simple, pious souls by plain language. Spoken words have to a great extent ceased to be the appropriate vehicle for appealing either to religious reason or to religious emotion—books for the former, music for the latter, are infinitely more effective. Music especially seems made to be the language of religion. Not only its beauty and harmony, but its vagueness, and its power of exciting the imagination and stirring the feelings, without anything definite which has to be proved and can be contradicted, fit it to be the interpreter of those emotions and aspirations which fill the human soul in presence of the universe and of the Great Unknown. Demonstrate, with St. Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus, how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, and I remain unaffected; but let me hear Rossini’s ‘Cujus Animam,’ or Mozart’s ‘Agnus Dei,’ and I say, ‘Thus the angels sing.’

In this respect the Roman Catholic Church has retained a great advantage over reformed churches. Whatever we may think of its tenets and principles, its forms of worship are more impressive and more attractive. The Mass, apart from all dogma and miracle, is a mysterious and beautiful religious drama, in which appropriate symbolism, vocal and instrumental music, all the highest efforts of human art, are united to produce feelings of joy and of devoutness. The vestment of the priest, his gestures and genuflexions, the Latin words chanted in stately recitative, the flame of the candles pointing heavenwards, the burning incense slowly soaring upwards, the music of great masters, not like our dreary and monotonous psalmody, but in fullest harmony and richest melody—all combine to attune the mind to that state of feeling which is the soul of religion.

In this respect, however, what I have called the Zoroastrian theory of religion affords great advantages. It connects religion directly with all that is good and beautiful, not only in the higher realms of speculation and of emotion, but in the ordinary affairs of daily life. To feel the truth of what is true, the beauty of what is beautiful, is of itself a silent prayer or act of worship to the Spirit of Light; to make an honest, earnest, effort to attain this feeling, is an offering or act of homage. Cleanliness of mind and body, order and propriety in conduct, civility in intercourse, and all the homely virtues of everyday life, thus acquire a higher significance, and any wilful and persistent disregard of them becomes an act of mutiny against the Power whom we have elected to serve. Such moral perversion becomes impossible as that which in the Middle Ages associated filth with holiness, and adduced as a title to canonisation that the saint had worn the same woollen shirt until it fell to pieces under the attacks of vermin. We laugh at this in more enlightened days, but we often imitate it by setting up false religious standards, and thinking we can make men better by penning them up on Sundays in the foul air and corrupting influences of densely peopled cities.

The identification of moral and physical evil, which is one of the most essential and peculiar tenets of the Zoroastrian creed, is fast becoming a leading idea in modern civilisation. Our most earnest philanthropists and zealous workers in the fields of sin and misery in crowded cities are coming, more and more every day, to the conviction that an improvement in the physical conditions of life is the first indispensable condition of moral and religious progress. More air, more light, better lodging, better food, more innocent and healthy recreation, are what are wanted to make any real impression on the masses who have either been born and bred in an evil environment, or have fallen out of the ranks and are the waifs and stragglers left behind in the rapid progress and intense competition of modern society. Hence we see that the devoted individuals and charitable institutions who take the lead in works of practical benevolence direct their attention more and more to the rescue of children from bad surroundings; to sending them to new and happier homes in the colonies, to country retreats for the sickly, and excursions for the healthy; and to providing clubs and reading-rooms as substitutes for the gin-palace and public-house. The latest development of this idea, that of the ‘People’s Palace’ in the East End of London, is a noble offering to the ‘Spirit of Light,’ by whatever name we choose to call him, in opposition to the ‘Spirit of Darkness.’

To the Zoroastrian, prayer assumes the form of a recognition of all that is pure, sublime, and beautiful in the surrounding universe. He can never want opportunities of paying homage to the Good Spirit and of looking into the abysses of the unknown with reverence and wonder. The light of setting suns, the dome of loving blue, the clouds in the might of the tempest or resting still as brooding doves, the mountains, the

the ocean lashed by storm, or where it

these are a Zoroastrian’s prayers.

And even if, ‘in populous cities pent,’ he is cut off from close communion with nature, opportunities are not wanting to him of letting his soul soar aloft with purifying aspirations. A glimpse of the starry sky, even if seen from a London street, may bear in on him the awful yet lovely mystery of the Infinite. Good books, good music, true works of art, may all strengthen his love of the good and beautiful. A dense fog, or drizzling rain may obscure the outward view, but with the inner eye he may stand listening to the lark or under the vernal sky, and while his

thank the Good Spirit that it has been given to man to write, and to him to read, verses of such exquisite perfection as Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’ and Tennyson’s ‘Early Spring.’ Above all, where men congregate in masses, in the great centres of politics, of commerce, of literature, science, and art, he can hear best

and associate himself with movements in which his little individual effort is exerted towards making the world a little better rather than a little worse than he found it.

This, rather than wrangling with his fellow-mortals about creeds and attempts to name the unnameable, believe the unbelievable, and define the undefineable, seems to me to be the religion of the future. Call it by what name you like, I quarrel with no one as long as he can find