y
the practical conviction is essential, this is not the same as to say
that all else is superfluous. There may be no single utterance that my
religion could not have spared, and yet were I to be altogether dumb my
religion would, indeed, be as nothing. For if I believe, I accept a
presence in my world, which as I live will figure in my dreams, or in my
thoughts, or in my habits. And each of these expressions of myself will
have a truth if it do but bear out my practical acceptance of that
presence. The language of religion, like that of daily life, is not the
language of science except it take it upon itself to be so. There is
scarcely a sentence which I utter in my daily intercourse with men which
is not guilty of transgressions against the canons of accurate and
definite thinking. Yet if I deceive neither myself nor another, I am
held to be truthful, even though my language deal with chance and
accident, material purposes and spiritual causes, and though I vow that
the sun smiles or the moon lets down her hair into the sea. Science is a
special interest in the discovery of unequivocal and fixed conceptions,
and employs its terms with an unalterable connotation. But no such
algebra of thought is indispensable to life or conversation, and its
lack is no proof of error. Such is the case also with that eminently
living affair, religion. I may if I choose, and I will if my reasoning
powers be at all awakened, be a theologian. But theology, like science,
is a special intellectual spontaneity. St. Thomas, the master
theologian, did not glide unwittingly from prayer into the _quaestiones_
of the "Summa Theologiae," but turned to them as to a fresh adventure.
Theology is inevitable, because humanly speaking adventure is
inevitable. For man, with his intellectual spontaneity, every object is
a problem; and did he not seek sooner or later to define salvation,
there would be good reason to believe that he did not practically reckon
with any. But this is _similarly_ and _independently_ true of the
imagination, the most familiar means with which man clothes and vivifies
his convictions, the exuberance with which he plays about them and
delights to confess them. The imagination of religion, contributing what
Matthew Arnold called its "poetry and eloquence," does not submit itself
to such canons as are binding upon theology or science, but exists and
flourishes in its own right.

The indispensableness to religion of the imagination