d to consist in "the absence of habitual
admiration, and in a state of the feelings, not ardent but cold and
torpid" (p. 129). It would appear then that religion, in its new sense,
is enthusiasm of well-nigh any kind, but particularly the enthusiasm of
morality, which is "the religion of right," the enthusiasm of art, which
is "the religion of beauty," and the enthusiasm of physical science,
which is "the religion of law and of truth" (p. 125).[36] "Art and
science," we read, "are not secular, and it is a fundamental error to
call them so; they have the nature of religion" (p. 127). "The popular
Christianity of the day, in short, is for the artist too melancholy and
sedate, and for the man of science too sentimental and superficial; in
short, it is too melancholy for the one, and not melancholy enough for
the other. They become, therefore, dissenters from the existing
religion; sympathizing too little with the popular worship, they worship
by themselves and dispense with outward forms. But they protest at the
same time that, in strictness, they separate from the religious bodies
around them, only because they know of a purer or a happier religion"
(p. 126). It is useful to turn, from time to time, from the abstract to
the concrete, in order to steady and purge our mental vision. Let us
therefore, in passing, gaze upon Theophile Gautier, the high priest of
the pride of human form, whose unspeakably impure romance has been
pronounced by Mr. Swinburne to be "the holy writ of beauty;" and, on the
other, upon Schopenhauer, the most thorough-going and consistent of
physicists, who reduces all philosophy to a cosmology, and consider
whether, the author of "Ecce Homo" himself being judge, the religion of
the one can be maintained to be purer or that of the other to be
happier, than the most degraded form of popular Christianity. I proceed
to his declaration, which naturally follows from what has been said,
that the essence of religion is not in theological dogma nor in ethical
practice. The really religious man, as we are henceforth to conceive of
him, is, apparently, the man of sentiment. "The substance of religion is
culture," which is "a threefold devotion to Goodness, Beauty, and
Truth," and "the fruit of it the higher life" (p. 145). And the higher
life is "the influence which draws men's thoughts away from their
personal existence, making them intensely aware of other existences, to
which it binds them by strong ties, somet