I trust I have not misrepresented Mr. Dewey's teaching. Indeed, with an individual teacher I should have no quarrel, were he not in a position of authority; but it is another matter when such doctrines are spreading out from a lecture-room all over the country, and, as I hear from Chinese friends, are persuading the young reformers of the Far East that the only salvation for their people lies in adopting the crudest materialism of Western civilization, and in emancipating themselves from all that philosophy and religion hitherto have meant to the Occident as well as to the Orient. At least here is a matter to consider.
Now in one sense Mr. Dewey's theory of religion--I use this word preferably, since the classical forms of philosophy which he would reconstruct belonged essentially to the field of religion--in one sense this theory is so far from being revolutionary that it has been current almost from the inception of human thought. Plato knew that the religious temper was naturally reverential of the past and conservative in its influence. It was, indeed, for this reason that he gave to religion and to a philosophy of the unseen world so thorough a control over the polity of his state. Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome, not only recognized this function of religion, but went so far as to maintain that even the palpable fictions of superstition should be upheld as a safeguard against political anarchy. "Since the multitude," he argues, "is ever fickle and capricious, full of lawless passions, and irrational and violent resentments, there is no way left to keep them in order but the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstance that attends such kinds of fictions. On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they contrived to bring in these notions of the gods and of a future state into the popular belief." And on this basis Polybius goes on to show how the power and permanence of Rome were connected with a national morality grounded in irrational beliefs, whereas the inquisitive rationalism of Greece was the cause of her ethical and political decline. Livy's annals of Rome are inspired throughout by the same idea, though without the tincture of scepticism that pervades the philosophy of the Greek historian. The city on the Tiber, Livy thought, grew mighty and conquered the world because of her faith in the gods and in that mystical Fatum which presided over her destiny, and kept her, through all the formal changes of her government, true to her original _êthos_. "You will find," he writes, "all things have prospered for those who follow the gods, while adversity dogs those who spurn them--_invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus deos, adversa spernentibus_." So, for Tacitus, religion was, as he expresses it in his epigrammatic way, _instrumentum regni_. Christianity, though it altered much, maintained this same view. The greatest preacher of the ancient church, Chrysostom, was fond of pointing to the connection of religious humility, mother of all the virtues, with the principle of orderly subordination, on which, as on the golden chain of divine law, depended the stability of society and the happiness of the people.