the
future.

The business of the pure science is to ascertain the facts and state
the truth. To what use the facts and truth are afterwards put, is a
question with which the pure science has nothing to do. {4} The same
facts may be put to very different uses: from the same facts very
different conclusions may be drawn. The facts which the science of
religion establishes may be used and are used for different and for
contradictory purposes. The man who is agnostic or atheist uses them
to support his atheism or agnosticism; or even, if he is so unwise, to
prove it. The man who has religion is equally at liberty to use them
in his support; and if he rarely does that, at any rate he still more
rarely commits the mistake of imagining that the science of religion
proves the truth of his particular views on the subject of religion.
Indeed, his tendency is rather in the opposite direction: he is
unreasonably uneasy and apt to have a disquieting alarm lest the
science of religion may really be a danger to religion. This alarm may
very naturally arise when he discovers that to the scientific student
one religion is as another, and the question is indifferent whether
there is any truth in any form. It is very easy to jump from these
facts to the erroneous conclusion that science of religion is wholly
incompatible with religious belief. And of course it is quite human
and perfectly intelligible that that conclusion should be proclaimed
aloud as correct {5} and inevitable by the man who, being an atheist,
fights for what he feels to be the truth.

We must, therefore, once more insist upon the simple fact that science
of religion abstains necessarily from assuming either that religion is
true or is not true. What it does assume is what no one will deny,
viz. that religion is a fact. Religious beliefs may be right or they
may be wrong: but they exist. Therefore they can be studied,
described, classified, placed in order of development, and treated as a
branch of sociology and as one department of the evolution of the
world. And all this can be done without once asking the question
whether religious belief is true and right and good, or not. Whether
it is pronounced true or false by you or me, will not in the least
shake the fact that it has existed for thousands of years, that it has
had a history during that period, and that that history may be written.
We may have doubts whether the institution of private property is