thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the
same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in
the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical
Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in
modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use
of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these
faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary
individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true
religious system for himself--any more than he would be likely to
discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton
if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the
great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting
sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth
often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of
religious history.

But because we recognize a measure of truth in all the historical
Religions, it does not follow that we can recognize an equal amount of
truth in all of them. The idea that all the Religions teach much the
same thing--or that, while they vary about that unimportant part of
Religion which is called doctrine or dogma, they are all agreed about
Morality--is an idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant
ignorance which of late years has done most of the theological writing
in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. The real student of
comparative {150} Religion knows that it is only at a rather advanced
stage in the development of Religion that Religion becomes in any
important degree an ethical teacher at all. Even the highest and most
ethical Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in their
Theology. Not only can we recognize higher and lower Religions; but
the highest Religions, among many things which they have in common, are
at certain points diametrically antagonistic to each other. It is
impossible therefore reasonably to maintain that fashionable attitude
of mind towards these Religions which my friend Professor Inge once
described as a sort of honorary membership of all Religions except
one's own. If we are to regard the historical Religions as being of
any importance to our own personal religious life, we must choose
between them. If we put aside the case of Judaism in its most
cultivated modern form, a form in which it has