apply:
_whatever either fortifies or misleads the will is literal conviction_.
This test cannot be applied absolutely, because it can properly be
applied only to the intention of an individual experience. However I may
express my religion, that which I express, is, we have seen, an
expectation. The degree to which I literally mean what I say is then the
degree to which it determines my expectations. Whatever adds no item to
these expectations, but only recognizes and vitalizes them, is pure
imagination. But it follows that it is entirely impossible from direct
inspection to define any given _expression_ of religious experience as
myth, or to define the degree to which it is myth. It submits to such
distinctions only when viewed from the stand-point of the concrete
religious experience which it expresses. Any such given expression could
easily be all imagination to one, and all conviction to another.
Consider the passage which follows:

"And I saw the heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and
he that sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in
righteousness he doth judge and make war. And his eyes are a
flame of fire, and upon his head are many diadems; and he hath
a name written, which no one knoweth but he himself. And he is
arrayed in a garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is
called The Word of God."[106:14]

Is this all rhapsody, or is it in part true report? There is evidently
no answer to the question so conceived. But if it were to express my own
religious feeling it would have some specific proportion of literal and
metaphorical significance, according to the degree to which its detail
contributes different practical values to me. It might then be my
guide-book to the heavens, or only my testimony to the dignity and
mystery of the function of Christ.

The development of religion bears in a very important way upon this last
problem. The factor of imagination has undoubtedly come to have a more
clearly recognized role in religion. There can be no doubt that what we
now call myths were once beliefs, and that what we now call poetry was
once history. If we go back sufficiently far we come to a time when the
literal and the metaphorical were scarcely distinguishable, and this
because science had not emerged from the early animistic extension of
social relations. Men _meant_ to address their gods as they addressed
their fellows, and expected them to hear and respond, as