THE RELIGION OF EMOTION.

Auckland Star, Volume XXII, Issue 95, 25 April 1891, Page 2

THE RELIGION OF EMOTION.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —In your issue of Wednesday I noticed an article which is only worthy.of attention because it illustrates a manner of thinking and speaking -very prevalent at the present time. The writer seeim to bo in much the same relation to religions science as the Athenian Greeks were when they reckoned the doctrine of the Resurrection to be a "new god." A full and comprehensive religion—catholicity—give 3 proper, scope to the emotions in religion. A religion that is purely emotional is a" fraud. Buc wo are always nowadays having people who get hold of a fragment of truth, or an aspect of the truth, and work upon it " to the nth." It is this that has produced the 200 or so sects in England and America. It is quite true that some people are so influenced by their emotions as to be able to substitute their excitement for true and genuine religion. But to speak of a religion of the emotions is like saying that a man had a good dinner of saucepans and crockery. In the first place, a religion muei have a God. Excitement of the emotions can bo produced to the fullest extent without the existence of any ruling principle. A man who lives on his emotions only stultifies higher faculties of his nature. Sentiment has a real and true value in religion ; similarly, sympathy ; similarly, active work ; aud a man may find his full employment in life in any one of them. But everything wants ordering, regulating, and subjecting to the one external dominant will of God. A man who let? his emotions run vvild is equally foolish with the man who crushes them out of existence. We have a great deal of emotional excitement

to deal with in religion; the Church has been aware of this for the whole period of its existence. English people are supposed not to be very excitable, bub it all depends how you take them. We are in danger very often of allowing too much place to emotion and letting it usurp the dominant position over life. And we know by sad experience how many noisy charlatans have excited the people, to the manifest harm of the came. On the other hand, emotion under control is manifest in such virtues as zeal, the which we want much more of. Bub then zeal ha 3 got determination, will, in it. This is ono great bhing that se much of tha emotional travesties of religion havo nob. You cannoc build up a religion on any ono part of human nature by itself, leasb of •all the mora exercise of the emotions.—l am, etc., H.D.M.