WHAT IS RELIGION ? 307
man. But^ in a true faith, man feels that God demands from him the fulfilment of His will : demands that man should serve God.
And just this faith is lacking among- the men of our time — they do not even understand what it is like, and by faith they mean, either repeating with their lips what is given to them as the essence of faith, or the performance of ceremonies which, as Church-Christ- ianity teaches, help them to attain their desires.
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People in our world live without any faith. One part, the educated, wealthy minority, having freed themselves from the Church hypnotism, believe in nothing at all, and look upon every faith as an absurdity, or as merely a useful means of keeping the masses in subjection. The immense, poor, uneducated majority — consisting of people who, with few excep- tions, are really sincere — being still under the hypno- tism of the Church, think they believe in what is suggested to them as a faith, although it is not really a faith, for instead of elucidating to man his position in the world it only darkens it.
This situation, and the relations of the non-believing, insincere minority to the hypnotized majority, are the conditions which shape the life of our so-called Chris- tian world. And this life — both of the minority which holds in its hands the means of hypnotization, and of the hypnotized majority — is terrible, both on account of the cruelty and immorality of the ruling classes, and of the crushed and stupefied condition of the great working masses. Never at any period of religious decline has the neglect and forgetfulness of the chiei characteristic of all religion, and of Christianity in particular — the principle of human equality — fallen to so low a level as it has descended to in our time.
A chief cause, in our time, of the terrible cruelty of man to man — besides the complete absence of religion — is the refined complexity of life, which hides
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