REDEMPTIVE RELIGIONS The prophetic movement is one symptom of the enhanced sense of personal and religious values, and the emergence of religions of salvation or redemption is another. Both indicate a slacken ing of the tie which binds religion to the national and political structure. For the official religion which men share simply as citizens of the state, a religion concerned with external observ ance rather than inner spirit and motives, no longer satisfies the more personal needs of which men are becoming aware. Corre sponding to this increasing self-consciousness there grows up a craving for a more intimate and individual relation with the divine Power, a craving which the traditional religious forms cannot meet. And this feeling is deepened by the personal sense of the evils and sufferings of life. This longing for deliverance finds no fulfilment in the customary and external religion that a man inherits from his social group. Some better way is necessary; and the personal consciousness of the need of salvation carries with it a sense of responsibility for realizing it. So men seek some mode of expressing the religious spirit which shall embody their choice and preference, for religion must be in a more intimate sense their own. As the new movement takes its rise from broadly human needs, the form of religion which meets these needs can not be merely local and particular : in its meaning at least it will be universal. This implies that the form of the religious relation is reconstituted, and this carries with it a differentiation of the religious community from political society. There now come into being religious associations or churches, where membership is based on a voluntary adherence to a particular religion or cult. This principle of a sacred society or church, clearly distinguished from secular society, is of great significance in the evolution of religion. For only under such conditions can the other-worldly or transcendent element in faith come to its due, and religion it self be delivered from bondage to political and secular interests. The idea of the sacred gains spiritual significance : the sacred community is united not merely in the observance of sacred rites but by a common .disposition of the mind and will towards a religious good. And this good is not mundane but supramun dane.
The new tendency finds expression in different ways. It appears as a movement which, without deliberately breaking with exist ing religion, takes form in religious associations which minister to felt religious wants. Again it appears as a philosophic gospel which offers spiritual deliverance to elect souls. Finally it mani fests itself in the birth of a new religion, a religion which origi nates with a personal founder who proclaims a message of salva tion. To the first class belong the various forms of Mystery
Religions which were common in Greek and Mediterranean lands from a period of eight centuries B.C. One of the best known is the Orphic Mysteries, a cult open at least to all Hellenes who under went initiation. This cult held out the prospect of immortality and union with the divine. The body was a kind of tomb (c a, from which the soul had to win deliverance. The way of salvation was by purification, abstinence and sacramental rites. The idea of something peculiarly sacred, in which the initiated participate, is common to Mystery-Religions. The later Mystery Cults, like those of Attis, Isis and Mithras, which were wide spread in Eastern Mediterranean lands in the post-Alexandrian period, set in the foreground the spectacle of the dying and reviv ing god. Their votaries, through baptism, purification and a sacra mental meal, somehow shared in the being of the god and with him rose to new life.
In the philosophic sphere, Neo-Platonism proclaims the deliv erance of the soul through an ecstatic union with the One that transcends rational thinking. Philosophic Brahmanism likewise has a doctrine of salvation, but a salvation through knowledge of the identity of the self with the Absolute or Brahman.
In Buddhism and in Christianity the spirit of redemptive reli gion is most fully expressed. In Buddhism the principle is seen taking an extreme subjective form. Buddha discards the meta physics of Brahmanism, though he shares with it the idea that salvation comes through knowledge. The Enlightened, the Arahat, knows that thirst, with its attendant desire and suffering, is the evil of life, and by following the Noble Eightfold Way he ad vances to that indefinable goal, Nirvana. Redemption is thus a negative process : it is a gospel for the monk who breaks with the world rather than for the ordinary man who has to live in the world. Christian redemption is a richer and more positive conception. The deliverance sought is from moral evil or sin, and it is conditioned by repentance and faith. The end is not the extinction of personality but its enrichment through the power of a divine life, and it has corporate expression in life in the King dom of God which overcomes the evil in the world. Christian redemption is marked by its theistic basis, its sense of personal values and its positive character. The religious society of Bud dhism is a monkish community : that of Christianity is the Church, or the fellowship of the faithful united in the service of God.