What is Religion

nly of value when it is completely disinterested. Science and art must be entirely disinterested ; the investigator must regard the highest interests of human life as secondary to the interest of Truth. The love of the Beautiful is of a more intense and personal nature, but, as a clever art critic has remarked, it is, and must ever be, an abstract love. It is a love springing from intense contemplation, in which the object remains a thing quite apart from the person interested in it. The desire to have this beauty, to wish to gain possession of it, is no longer aesthetic, and mars the pure, intuitive vision of beauty. Now, religion stands in complete contrast to all this, for everything connected with it is of the keenest, deepest personal interest. Our will power and our feelings are worked up to the highest point of tension; we desire to have, to possess, to be something. Religion can awaken in us the most intense feeling ; it unfetters our mental powers, kindles our firiest passions.There is a fomenting, a seething, a wild surging of the good and evil elements within us. And just because religion is a striving after life it is brought into a peculiarly close and yet a curiously antagonistic relation to every department of human activity which is concerned with the striving after possessions. This peculiar relation does not exist between religion and science, art or morality. Between these it would be easy to establish a profitable and mutually beneficial relati...