XXII--RECONCILIATION
Religion
By religion I mean a living sense that man proposes and God disposes,
that we must watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, that
he who thinketh he standeth must take heed lest he fall, and the
countless other like elementary maxims which a man must hold as he
holds life itself if he is to be a man at all.
If religion, then, is to be formulated and made tangible to the
people, it can only be by means of symbols, counters and analogies,
more or less misleading, for no man professes to have got to the root
of the matter and to have seen the eternal underlying verity face to
face--and even though he could see it he could not grip it and hold
it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these
feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed,
then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the
help of images or idols--by the help of something not more actually
true than a child's doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our
weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt gratifies and
stimulates the motherly instinct in the child.
Therefore we ought not to cavil at the visible superstition and
absurdity of much on which religion is made to rest, for the unknown
can never be satisfactorily rendered into the known. To get the
known from the unknown is to get something out of nothing, a thing
which, though it is being done daily in every fraction of every
second everywhere, is logically impossible of conception, and we can
only think by logic, for what is not in logic is not in thought.
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