ssary in
an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the
chief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the
best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is "so malapert as a
splenetic religion," a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.

[Sidenote: But not literally true.]

At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he
forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's
minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges
them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better
conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time,
where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together.
Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the
poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by
the philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it
sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that
has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and
probably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a
historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In
the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some
difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new
convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which
is essentially as arbitrary as the old.

[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular.]

The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not
more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no
religion in particular. A courier's or a dragoman's speech may indeed be
often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture
of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning
only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and
its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to
another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often
retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may
egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they
remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which
a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment's probing of the
conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but
vestiges of old beliefs, creases w