eject such
arbitrary definitions is called atheism by those who frame them; but a
man who studies for himself the ominous and the friendly aspects of
reality and gives them the truest and most adequate expression he can is
repeating what the founders of religion did in the beginning. He is
their companion and follower more truly than are the apologists for
second-hand conceptions which these apologists themselves have never
compared with the facts, and which they prize chiefly for
misrepresenting actual experience and giving it imaginary extensions.

Religion is not essentially an imposture, though it might seem so if we
consider it as its defenders present it to us rather than as its
discoverers and original spokesmen uttered it in the presence of nature
and face to face with unsophisticated men. Religion is an interpretation
of experience, honestly made, and made in view of man's happiness and
its empirical conditions. That this interpretation is poetical goes
without saying, since natural and moral science, even to-day, are
inadequate for the task. But the mythical form into which men cast their
wisdom was not chosen by them because they preferred to be imaginative;
it was not embraced, as its survivals are now defended, out of
sentimental attachment to grandiloquent but inaccurate thoughts.
Mythical forms were adopted because none other were available, nor could
the primitive mind discriminate at all between the mythical and the
scientific. Whether it is the myth or the wisdom it expresses that we
call religion is a matter of words. Certain it is that the wisdom is
alone what gives the myth its dignity, and what originally suggested it.
God's majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image.

[Sidenote: Practice precedes theory in religion.]

Fear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers,
conceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible,
now auspicious. The influence is real and directly felt; the gods'
function is unmistakable and momentous, while their name and form, the
fabulous beings to which that felt influence is imputed, vary with the
resources of the worshipper's mind and his poetic habits. The work of
expression, the creation of a fabulous environment to derive experience
from, is not, however, the first or most pressing operation employing
the religious mind. Its first business is rather the work of
propitiation; before we stop to contemplate th