ce of a dead religion. This is, when we
consider the meaning of the phrase, the strangest of paradoxes, the
existence in fact of a logical contradiction. For religion is in its
essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of
the experience of a living person. As experience is not merely alive,
but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth
and in intensity. So far then as we are in any true sense religious men,
our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an
intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction in which our
experience grows. Hence a dead religion is a logical contradiction, as
we have said. But, as truth is stranger than fiction, so life contains
anomalies and monstrosities which simply set logic at defiance. A dead
religion is indeed a monstrum, something portentous, which refuses to be
reconciled with any canons of rationality. But it exists--that is the
astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and
embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord's time. There
are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them
receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels
of Pharisaic religion.

(_a_) It tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to
repose upon tradition. It is academic, a thing on which scribes may
lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant
repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul.
"They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the
scribes. A fresh (not new) teaching, with authority!"

(_b_) It removes the living God to an infinite distance from human life.
Religion is a matter of rules, of minute obedience to a code of morals
and of ceremonial imposed from without, not of a fellowship of the human
with the Divine. In fact, God is banished to a point on the far
circumference, and the centre is occupied by the Law. He is retained in
order to give authority to that Law, as the source of sanctions in the
way of rewards and punishments. In short, the idea of the living God
degenerates into the necessary convention of an ecclesiastical tradition.

(_c_) Closely connected with this second feature is the third
characteristic of a dead religion--its inhumanity. When men substitute
obedience to a code for service of the living God, it is no wonder