mes at the same time a continuous
incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is
strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and
in the conscience.

[Sidenote: It precedes science rather than hinders it.]

On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken
the place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve
situations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely
worse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical
slavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it.
Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may
happen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it.
We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and
natural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must
rather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative
insight which it has introduced into the world.

[Sidenote: It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human.]

We may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the function
which religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguising
or in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allow
ourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its various
conceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of many
sages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have lived
steadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself be
treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which
alone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to be
intolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religions
display. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would have
to be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with the
poetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety,
and variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approach
to total adequacy.

If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by
taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the
Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and
when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and
justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a
rabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for ins