, God
shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos
repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul
must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.

And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,
is what we call religion.

What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and
how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based
upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of
it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way
or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the
Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to
be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:
_profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quae
nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni
obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with
which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it
from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis
superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_
(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have
shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,
or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge
into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate
between them?

It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the
principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling
of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better
described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is
any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of
Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple
feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a
desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there
much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious
longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And
to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the
judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the
necessary consequence of