hich thought, even if emptied of all
dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first
unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be
found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves
spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some
faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a
converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked
idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message
and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens
and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another
world to live in--whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or
no--is what we mean by having a religion.

[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason.]

What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call
religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two
is close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is
the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us
that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain
the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion.
Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational
life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the
Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be
subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and
makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same
thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and
transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of
Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of
emancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways
religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A
supernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon
earth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by
repeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in
the absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration
in the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved
may be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in
its way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common
objects, political and intellectual, in