poetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion to
their original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports of
objective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed upon
the world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if not
in space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religion
comes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering of
that moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks to
elucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding which
clings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merely
representations of experience as it is or should be, but are rather
information about experience or reality elsewhere--an experience and
reality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed by
reality and experience here.

[Sidenote: When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised.]

Thus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has;
only poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure value
to existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poetic
value of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself,
because religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sides
of life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and ideal
interpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinary
poetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part by
the abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightness
is taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world only
by imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition to
the mind's furniture--an addition which might be useful and
ennobling--it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuading
mankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as that
rather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfaction
is naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul has
infinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems and
sentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomes
equivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic
representation of moral reality which may have a most important function
in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the
lessons of experience. But it beco