Religion is as various as humanity. Its reactions to life are sometimes intelligent and creative, sometimes stupid, stultifying, and destructive. Through its doctrines it presents sometimes an adequate picture of the nature and quality of ultimate Reality, sometimes a picture colored by the lowest of human cravings, and therefore wholly untrue. Its consequences are sometimes very good, sometimes monstrously and diabolically evil.

In considering a group of organized religions, or the religious beliefs and practices of a group of individuals, how can we distinguish between the truer and the less true, the better and the less good? One of the answers given by all the great religious teachers is that “by their fruits ye shall know them.” But, unfortunately, fruits often take a long time to observe; the full consequences of adherence to a given religion will not be manifested in all circumstances, and the would-be critic must often wait, before passing judgment, until external events provide the opportunity for making a crucial observation. Nor is this all. The fruits of certain less good practices and less true beliefs do not take the form of positive wrong-doings or obviously recognizable disasters. They are of a subtler, more negative kind—not sins, but failures to achieve the highest development of which the individual or group is capable; not catastrophes, but the nonattainment of the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, and peace. But such failures and nonattainments can be measured only by observers of more than ordinary insight, or by those who are so placed that they can look back over a long span of the career of the individuals or groups under consideration.

It is clear, then, that, besides the criterion of fruits, we need another more readily applicable—a criterion by which to judge the roots and flowers from which the fruits spring. Thanks to the insight of specially gifted individuals and to the collective experience of generations of worshipers, such criterion for evaluating the doctrines and practices of religion have been discovered and only require to be intelligently applied.

The most elementary criterion is that which has reference to the unity or plurality of the object of worship. It has been found that the doctrines and practices of monotheism are, generally speaking, truer and better than those of polytheism, and lead to more satisfactory results, both for individuals and for societies. But the distinction between monotheism and polytheism is not enough. Two men may both be monotheists; but the nature of the God believed in by the first may be profoundly different from that of the God believed in by the second, and their religious practices may be as diverse as their theoretical conceptions. But the one God —and this is affirmed by all those who have fulfilled the conditions which alone make possible a clear insight into the nature and quality of Reality —is a God of love. In the light of these insights we may refine our criterion and assert that those beliefs will be truer, and those practices better, which have as their object a single God of love. But even a God of love can be conceived of, and therefore worshiped, in a variety of ways, and with diverse consequences for individuals and societies. To become fully adequate, our criterion requires to be further refined. Once again, the new qualification of the elementary criterion is provided by those theocentric mystics who alone have fulfilled the conditions upon which insight depends. The truer forms of religion are those in which God is conceived, not only as one and loving, but also as eternal (that is to say, outside time); and the better forms of religious practice are those which aim at creating in the mind a condition approximating to timelessness. (Reality cannot make itself known except to those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions of “mortification,” and have rendered themselves commensurable with God by becoming, as far as they can, unified, loving and, in some measure, timeless.) Conversely, the less true forms of religious belief are those which emphasize God’s everlastingness rather than his eternal presence in a nontemporal Now; and the less-good religious practices are those which stress the importance of petitionary prayer addressed to a temporal God for the sake of personal or social advantages in temporal affairs, and which, in general, substitute a preoccupation with future time for the mystic’s concern with the timeless presence of eternal Reality.

In theory all the higher religions have insisted that the final end of man, the purpose of his existence upon earth, is the realization, partially in the oresent life, more completely in some other state, of time-ess Reality. In practice, however, a majority of the adherents of these religions have always behaved as if man’s primary concern were not with eternity, but with time. At any given moment several quite different religions go by the name of Christianity, say, or Buddhism, or Taoismreligions ranging all the way from the purest mysticism to the grossest fetishism.

In all the higher religions the doctrines about eternal Reality, and the practices designed to help worshipers to render themselves sufficiently timeless to apprehend an eternal God, bear a close family resemblance. Eckhart, as Professor Otto has shown in his “Mysticism East and West,” formulates a philosophy which is substantially the same as that of Sankara; and the practical teaching of Indian and Christian mystics is identical in such matters as “holy indifference” to temporal affairs; mortification of memory for the past and anxiety about the future; renunciation of petitionary prayer in favor of simple abandonment to the will of God; purification not only of the will, but also of the imagination and intellect, so that the consciousness of the worshiper may partake in some measure of the intense undifferentiated timelessness of that which he desires to apprehend and be united with. For the theocentric mystics both of East and West, it is axiomatic that one must “seek first the kingdom of God” (the timeless kingdom of an eternal God) “and his righteousness” (the righteousness of eternity over and above the righteousness of life in time); and that, only if one does this, is there any prospect of “all the rest being added.”

In the less true forms of the genuine religions and, still more, in the humanistic pseudo-religions of Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, and the like, the position is completely reversed. For here the fundamental commandment and its accompanying promise are, “Seek ye first all the rest, and the kingdom of God and his righteousness shall be added to you.”

Among the religious, the seeking first of temporal values is always associated with the idea of a God who, being in time rather than eternity, is not spiritual but “psychical.” Believers in a temporal God make use of passionately willed and intensely felt petitionary prayer for concrete benefits, such as health and prosperity before death and, afterward, a place in some everlasting heaven. These petitionary prayers are accompanied by rituals and sacraments which, by stimulating imagination and intensifying emotions, help to create that psychic “field,” within which petitionary prayer takes on the power to get itself answered. The fact that “spiritual healing” (more accurately, “psychic healing”) often works, and that prayers for one’s own or other people’s health, wealth, and happiness often get answered, is constantly put forward by the devotees of temporal religion as a proof that they are being directly helped by God. One might just as well argue that one is being directly helped by God because one’s refrigerator works, or because somebody answers when one dials a number on the telephone. All one has a right to say of such things as “spiritual healing” and answers to prayer is that they are happenings permitted by God in exactly the same way as other natural psycho-physical phenomena are permitted. That the mind has extensive powers over and above those which are ordinarily used in everyday life has been known from time immemorial; and at all periods and in all countries these powers have been exploited, for good and for evil, by mediums, healers, prophets, medicine men, magicians, hatha yogis, and the other queer fish who exist and have always existed on the fringes of everv society. During the last two or three generations some efforts have been made to investigate these powers and the conditions under which they are manifested. The phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion have been carefully explored. Under the auspices of the Society of Psychical Research a thoroughly respectable and critical literature of the abnormal has come into existence. Research into extrasensory perception is carried on in a number of university laboratories; and now, in at least one of those laboratories, there is piling up significant evidence for the existence of “Pk,” or the ability of persons to interfere with the movements of material objects by means of a purely mental act. If people working under the most uninspiring laboratory conditions can perceive clairvoyantly, exercise foreknowledge, and affect the fall of dice by purely mental acts, then clearly we have no right whatever to invoke a direct intervention of God in the case of similar phenomena, just because they happen to take place in a church or to the accompaniment of religious rites.

In this context, it is highly significant that the great theocentric mystics have always drawn a sharp distinction between the “psychic” and the “spiritual.” In their view, phenomena of the first class have their existence in an unfamiliar, but in no way intrinsically superior, extension of the space-time world. Spiritual phenomena, on the other hand, belong to the timeless and eternal order, within which the temporal order has its less real existence. The mystics’ attitude to “miracles” is one of intellectual acceptance, and emotional and volitional detachment. Miracles happen, but they are of very little importance. Moreover, the temptation to perform “miracles” should always be resisted. For mystics, this temptation is particularly strong; for those who try to make themselves timelessly conscious of eternal Reality frequently develop unusual psychic powers in the process. When this happens, it is essential to refrain from using such powers; for the user thereby places an impediment between himself and the Reality with which he hopes to be united. This advice is given as clearly by the masters of Western spirituality as by the Buddhists and Vedan-tists. But, unfortunately for Christianity, the teaching of the gospels upon this subject is somewhat confused. Jesus denounces those who ask for “signs,” but Himself performs many miracles of healing and the like. The explanation of this apparent inconsistency can probably be found in the passage, in which He asks His critics which is easier, to tell the sick man to rise and walk, or to tell him that his sins are forgiven him. The implication seems to be that physical “signs” are legitimate, if the person who performs them is so completely united with eternal Reality that he is able, by the very quality of his being, to modify the inner being of those, for whose sake the “signs” are performed. But this enormously important qualification has been generally neglected, and the adherents of the less true forms of the Christian religion attach enormous importance to such purely “psychic” phenomena as healing and the answer to petitionary prayer. By doing this they positively guarantee themselves against attaining that degree of union with timeless Reality which alone might render the performance of a “miracle” innocuous to the doer and permanently beneficial to the person on whom, or for whom, it is done.

Another form frequently taken by temporal religion is apocalypticism—belief in an extraordinary cosmic event to take place in the not-too-distant future, together with the practices deemed appropriate to this state of things. Here again intense preoccupation with future time positively guarantees the apocalypticist against the possibility of a timeless realization of eternal Reality.

In certain respects all the humanistic pseudo-religions, at present so popular, bear a close resemblance to the apocalyptic perversions of true religion. For in these also an intense preoccupation with hypothetical events in future time takes the place of the genuinely religious concern with Reality now, in the eternal present. But whereas believers in the approaching end of the world seldom find it necessary to coerce or slaughter those who do not agree with them, coercion and slaughter have formed an essential part of the program put forward by the crusaders for the humanistic pseudo-religions. For the revolutionary, whether of the right or the left, the supremely important fact is the golden age of peace, prosperity and brotherly love which, his faith assures aim, is bound to dawn as soon as his particular brand of revolution has been carried through. Nothing stands between the people’s miserable present and its glorious future, except a minority, perhaps a majority, of perverse or merely ignorant individuals. All that is necessary is to liquidate a few thousands, or it may be a few millions, of these living obstacles to progress, and then to coerce and propagandize the rest into acquiescence. When these unpleasant but necessary preliminaries are over, the golden age will begin. Such is the theory of that secular apocalypticism which is the religion of revolutionaries. But in practice, it is hardly necessary to say, the means employed positively guarantee that the end actually reached shall be profoundly different from that which the prophetic theorists envisaged.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. This “hedonistic paradox” may be generalized to cover our whole life in time. Temporal conditions will be accepted as satisfactory only by those whose first concern is not with time, but with eternal Reality and with that state of virtually timeless consciousness, in which alone the awareness of Reality is possible. Furthermore, in any given society, temporal conditions will be generally felt to be tolerable, and will in fact be as free from the grosser evils as human conditions ever can be, only when the current philosophy of life lays more stress upon eternity than upon time, and only when a minority of individuals within the society are making a serious attempt to live out this philosophy in practice. It is highly significant, as Sorokin has pointed out, that a man born into the eternity-conscious thirteenth century had a much better prospect of dying in his bed than a man of our own time—the obsessed and therefore nationalistic, revolutionary, and violent twentieth century. Si mon-umentum requiris, circumspice. So runs the epitaph carved on Wren’s tomb in St. Paul’s cathedral. Similarly, if you require a monument to modern man’s preoccupation with future time to the exclusion of present eternity, look round at the world’s battlefields and back over the history covered by the lifetime of a man of seventy—the history of that late-Victorian “Generation of Materialism,” so ably sketched in a recent volume by Professor Carlton Hayes, and the history of the generation which inevitably succeeded it, that of the wars and revolutions. Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.