hat prophet may be. All must fail, some more and some
less, but generally more, and thus all would fall from the faith at some
time or another, and there would be no Church left. And so another test
has been made necessary. If from his weakness a man cannot keep these
precepts, yet he can declare his belief in and his desire to keep them,
and here is a test that can be applied. Certain rites have been
instituted, and it has been laid down that those who by their submission
to these rites show their belief in the truth and their desire to follow
that truth as far as in them lies, shall be called the followers of the
faith. So in time it has come about that these ceremonial rites have
been held to be the true and only sign of the believer, and the fact
that they were but to be the earnest of the beginning and living of a
new life has become less and less remembered, till it has faded into
nothingness. Instead of the life being the main thing, and being
absolutely necessary to give value and emphasis to the belief, it has
come to pass that it is the belief, and the acceptance of the belief,
that has been held to hallow the life and excuse and palliate its
errors.

Thus of every religion is this true, that its essence is a belief that
certain doctrines are revelations of eternal truth, and that the fruit
of this truth is the observance of certain forms. Morality and works
may or may not follow, but they are immaterial compared with the other.
This, put shortly, is the view of every believer.

But to him who does not believe in a faith, who views it from without,
from the standpoint of another faith, the whole view is changed, the
whole perspective altered. Those landmarks which to one within the
circle seem to stand out and overtop the world are to the eyes of him
without dwarfed often into insignificance, and other points rise into
importance.

For the outsider judges a religion as he judges everything else in this
world. He cannot begin by accepting it as the only revelation of truth;
he cannot proceed from the unknown to the known, but the reverse. First
of all, he tries to learn what the beliefs of the people really are, and
then he judges from their lives what value this religion has to them. He
looks to acts as proofs of beliefs, to lives as the ultimate effects of
thoughts. And he finds out very quickly that the sacred books of a
people can never be taken as showing more than approximately their real
beliefs. Alwa