false religion is no philosophy at all.

Paganism produced none: the Pagans had a philosophy; but it stood in no
sort of relation, real or fancied relation, to their mythology or
worship. And the Mahometans, in times when they had universities and
professors' chairs, drew the whole of their philosophic systems from
Greece, without so much as ever attempting to connect these systems with
their own religious creed. But Christianity, on the other hand, the only
great doctrinal religion, the only religion which ties up--chains--and
imprisons human faith, where it is good for man's peace that he should
be fettered, is also the only religion which places him in perfect
liberty on that vast neutral arena where it is good for him to exercise
his unlimited energies of mind. And it is most remarkable, that whilst
Christianity so far shoots her rays into these neutral questions as to
invest them with grandeur, she keeps herself uncommitted and unpledged
to such philosophic problems in any point where they might ally
themselves with error. For instance, St. Austin's, or Calvin's doctrine
on free agency is so far Christian, that Christian churches have adopted
it into their articles of faith, or have even built upon it as a
foundation. So far it seems connected with Christian truth. Yet, again,
it is so far separate from Christian truth, that no man dares to
pronounce his brother heretical for doubting or denying it. And thus
Christianity has ministered, even in this side-chapel of its great
temple, to two great necessities: it has thrown out a permanent
temptation to human activity of intellect, by connecting itself with
tertiary questions growing out of itself derivatively and yet
indifferent to the main interests of truth. In this way Christianity has
ministered to a necessity which was not religious, but simply human,
through a religious radiation in a descending line. Secondly, it has
kept alive and ventilated through every age the direct religious
interest in its own primary truths, by throwing out secondary truths,
that were doubtfully related to the first, for polemical agitation.
Foolish are they who talk of our Christian disputes as arguments of an
unsound state, or as silent reproaches to the sanity or perfect
development of our religion. Mahometans are united, because the only
points that could disunite them relate generally to fact and _not_ to
doctrinal truths. Their very national heresies turn only on a ridiculous
pi