The Need of Religious Inspiration.
We hear that the day of religion is past until the voice of the true preacher is heard. Then the street is full of men waiting to hear him. From the complexity of modern life, men and women are looking for a unity. From the strife and discord of to-day men wish to hear the voice that will bring peace. We see the numberless happy faces. Behind the smile is the racking doubt and the tears are not far off. There was a time in Jewish History when a congregation would listen spellbound as the minister expounded at great length Talmudic allegories. To-day the men and women care very little for the abstract, or the purely intellectual in religion. Religion must be personal and come within the circuit of the individual's experience, if it is to become a living force in daily life. The disposition to watch ideas, their working as problems may give the mind pleasure without any real influence on human life. Judaism to-day is preached as a problem, instead of a living affirmation.
Looking at a new congregation is like looking the human race in the face. When one thinks how much of thought and feeling there is in the human being, how many angers, griefs, hopes, wishes, purposes, how much there is of goodness, how much that touches all the shores of human possibility, but never shows itself, we find that religion must drop way down into the horizon of human life, speaking to the hidden unconscious influences that rule action. Fundamentally, religion is not an intellectual or a theological matter, but it is a far off vision of the soul made concrete in personal life. Religious services must be psychologized by placing the needs of the individual before the abstract problems of religion. "What is mind?" asked a professor of philosophy of a student. "No
matter," replied the student. "What is matter?" "Never mind." In the same way must we answer the problems of religion that are put before us. Let an appeal be made to the inward being, to the humanity in him, he replies by giving himself.
Judaism must be a living force in Jewish life. We begin with the religious education of the child. The Sabbath School is the result. The training received at best is memoriter. At thirteen years the religious training stops at a time when the mind opens to the logical and the inward life of things. How can the mere memorizing of facts make Jewish girls and boys religious? Will it strengthen a child's belief although he may repeat every week, "I believe with a perfect faith." Is it possible that we are blind to the vast educational waste of trying to thrust all religious efforts in childhood. Of the 598 children who reported to a specialist on children's education, he found that before the age of thirteen, religion is mere form and that religious inclination arises between the ages of thirteen and twenty. The awakening of the need of religion is spontaneous, like the interest in music or nature. It is at this time that the dualism in human life, the contrast of the inward vision and the outward fact, the beloved ideal and the real, cause keen suffering, and youths seek from the world of feeling and strife, a re-at-onement. Then the soul of youth responds to great religious truths as a violin rightly tuned responds by sympathetic vibration to an orchestra. This is the time and opportunity for true religious development. Parri passu with the secular training must go the spiritual. This must be if religious education before confirmation is to mean anything. As conditions are at present, especially in smaller cities, Judaism amounts