ccordingly, every interesting thing was a
manifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its
superabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustine
toward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer
into which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness which
no one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and only
accidentally a moral ideal.

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion.]

Herein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion is
spontaneous and primary--a very few--those in whom it is imitative and
secondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected by
chance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature,
while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective
factors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come,
perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the
inner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those
super-human entities have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, for
those whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrine
about eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past.
Such a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it does
not require much experience or much shrewdness to discover that
supernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy which
was attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend,
in enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religious
traditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does not
furnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validity
underlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to the
subject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regard
religion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all that
worldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is
irrelevant to an artist's pleasure to be warned that the beauty he
expresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a
mathematician's reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his
supposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion is
inwardly justified. God has no need of natural or logical witnesses, but
speaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attraction
which dwells in whatever is good and bea