Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 52:205 (Jan 1895)
Article: On The Historical Study Of Religion
Author: A. A. Berle

BSac 52:205 (Jan 1895) p. 173

On The Historical Study Of Religion

A. A. Berle

Boston, Mass.

“Unter der Hülle aller Religionen liegt die Religion selbst.” Nothing more profound or far-reaching, as affecting the method and scope of religious investigation, has ever been uttered than this impressive sentence. The exclusivism which, until within very recent times, obscured or misrepresented the religious tendencies of other nations than those which professed Christianity, seems to be in a fair way to break away, and we are coming into the sunlight, where the object is truth first, and particular dogma afterward.

But the pioneers in this investigation were men in whom the religious faculties had been more or less dulled, either by neglect or otherwise, and who brought to their task only the barren furnishing of cold intellectual theories, which, having no kinship with the theme, necessarily brought forth only a single phase of the truth which they were obligated to seek. A healthful spirit is beginning to prevail, which, when it is everywhere brought to bear on the questions at issue, cannot but produce a great deal of light.

At the Anthropological Congress, held during the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, there was read a very suggestive paper by Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania. Its title was “The Scope and Method of Historical Study of Religions.” It is interesting to find him suggesting a point which has appeared more than once, already, in these Notes, namely, the importance of applying the results of the new psychology to the historical study of religions. He says on this point: —

“No less important than the utilization of researches made in this direction, are the bearings of the new psychology on the history of re-

BSac 52:205 (Jan 1895) p. 174

ligions. The interdependence between psychical processes and physiological states, is the part of the subject which I have more particularly in mind. Complementary to the more general bearing of racial traits, we have in the study and interpretation of mental phenomena, a valuable aid to an understanding of special and individual religious temperaments. It is perhaps too early to apply the results of physiological psychology in their fullest extent, but one is quite safe in predicting that our view of the great religious teachers of mankind, more especially of the mystics, is certain of being both clarified and modified by a deeper penetration into the workings of the mind peculiar to them.”

Dr. Jastrow has here sounded a note of vast importance, and which, as he intimates, is bound to make a great difference in many of the received views about holy things and holy p...