religion. He is accounted most religious whose religion
penetrates his life most intimately. In the man whose religion consists
in the outer exercise of attendance upon church, we recognize the sham.
He _appears_ to be religious. He does one of the things which a
religious man would do; but an object of religious faith is not the
constant environment of his life. He may or may not feel sure of God
from his pew, but God is not among the things that count in his daily
life. God does not enter into his calculations or determine his scale of
values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of
religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already
doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In
so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of
justification, even though I regard it as justifiable. In my religious
experience I am taking something for granted; in other words I act about
it and feel about it in a manner that is going to be determined by the
special conditions of my mood and temperament. The mechanical and
prosaic man acknowledges God in his mechanical and prosaic way. He
believes in divine retribution as he believes in commercial or social
retribution. He is as careful to prepare for the next world as he is to
be respectable in this. The poet, on the other hand, believes in God
after the manner of his genius. Though he worship God in spirit he may
conduct his life in an irregular manner peculiar to himself. Difference
of mood in the same individual may be judged by the same measure. When
God is most real to him, brought home to him most vividly, or
consciously obeyed, in these moments he is most religious. When, on the
other hand, God is merely a name to him, and church a routine, or when
both are forgotten in the daily occupations, he is least religious. His
life on the whole is said to be religious in so far as periods of the
second type are subordinated to periods of the first type. Further
well-known elements of belief, corollaries of the above, are evidently
present in religion. A certain _imagery remains constant_ throughout an
individual's experience. He comes back to it as to a physical object in
space. And although religion is sporadically an exclusive and isolated
affair, it tends strongly to be social. The religious object, or God, is
a social object, common to me and to my neighbor, and presupposed in
our collective undertakings. This reduct