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What is the generally accepted sense in which the word "religion" is used in our own times? The same persons are found to use the term in somewhat different senses. It may denote the creed or technical beliefs of different people — or the rites and ceremonies of each religious section of humanity. But religious doctrines and rites both derive their origin from the sentiment of religion which is common to all the religions of the world. Both belief and practice are dependent on what we may call a sentiment of God, a consciousness that there is a God, a desire to believe correctly about Him, and to please Him by certain actions. The sentiment is the same under whatever forms the religious doctrine and practice may show themselves. Religion is independent of the forms it may assume. Religion is radically a consciousness of God, involving various thoughts and feelings concerning Him, but always more or less coupled with a sense of personal obligation to Him. Religions are the various modes in which that consciousness is expressed, both as to the intellectual notions concerning God held as doctrines, and the rites, ceremonies, and practices regarded as obligatory, or as deemed pleasing to God.

I. RELIGION DOES NOT CONSIST IN MERE BELIEFS ABOUT GOD, OR IN THE OBSERVANCE OF RELIGIOUS RITES. Not that these are of no importance, only that they must not be put as substitutes for true religion. Since Comte's day there has been a tendency to confound religion with morality. The two things are distinct, though inseparable.

II. RELIGION IS NOT ALWAYS ASSOCIATED WITH TRUE BELIEFS. The intellectual beliefs of a man's religion can only be approximations to the truth more or less remote; rites and ceremonies are obligatory so far as we find them serviceable to our own spiritual culture, and beneficial to the community as acts of social worship. The value of religion consists in its affording satisfaction to the most imperative demands of our nature; in its power to soothe and console the mind under bitterest griefs; and in the bright hopes which it inspires for the life to come. The refinement and elevation of character among the vast majority of our race have been mainly owing to the sanctions created or intensified by religious emotion. Not one of human sorrows can be so adequately, so bounteously compensated for as by religion. Stoicism, the privilege only of the few, can only be enjoyed by turning the heart to stone. Epicurism, the resource of spiritual dipsomaniacs, is a remedy more degrading than suicide. Philanthropic enthusiasm, noble in itself, and demanded from us by religion, will only act as an anodyne, leaving the heart, in the intervals of its influence, face to face with its inconsolable misery. But religion reconciles us to all forms and degrees of sorrow. It turns every event that seems hostile into the act of a Faithful Friend. Religion reigns over the entire man — not content with the outward polish of the manners, but purifying at their source the principles and motives of all right conduct.

(C. Voysey, M.A.)

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KJV: Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

WEB: Her ways are ways of pleasantness. All her paths are peace.