Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general termspossible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that oursupreme good lies in harmoniously² adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment arethe religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of thepsychological peculiarities⁴ of such an attitude as this, or belief in an object which we cannot see.

All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the "objects" of ourconsciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along withourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought.

In either case they elicit⁵ from us a REACTION; and the reaction due to things of thought isnotoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. Thememory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We arefrequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them;and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that materialsensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.

The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities⁶ whom they worship, are known tothem only in idea. It has been vouchsafed⁷, for example, to very few Christian⁸ believers to have hada sensible vision of their Saviour⁹; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way ofmiraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian religion,therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer,is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's pastexperience directly serves as a model.

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