ity intrinsically impossible.--Intellectual victory over
change.--The glory of it.--Reason makes man's divinity and his
immortality.--It is the locus of all truths.--Epicurean immortality,
through the truth of existence.--Logical immortality, through objects of
thought.--Ethical immortality, through types of excellence Pages 251-273

CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

The failure of magic and of mythology.--Their imaginative value.--Piety
and spirituality justified.--Mysticism a primordial state of
feeling.--It may recur at any stage of culture.--Form gives substance
its life and value. Pages 274-279

REASON IN RELIGION

CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON

[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant.]

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's,
that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." In every age the
most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and
country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that
religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the
heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a
while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against
is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident,
and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they
yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a
world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that
their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of
their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world's faith
was that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the
enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who
plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of
religion--something which the blindest half see--is not nearly
enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with
religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of
thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and
their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face
with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him
understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so
profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and nece