ut for fear of misunderstanding I prefer to state it.) Every
dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but for all that
the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending
some things and these of enormous importance. It may also be that the
contents of this mystical apprehension cannot be put into language
without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt
and lived than uttered and intellectually analysed, and thus do not
properly fall under the category of true or false, in the sense in which
these words are applied to propositions; yet they may be something
for which "true" is our nearest existing word and are often, if not
necessary at least highly advantageous to life. That is why man through
a series of more or less grossly anthropomorphic mythologies and
theologies with their concomitant rituals tries to restate them.
Meantime we need not despair. Serious psychology is yet young and has
only just joined hands with physiology. Religious students are still
hampered by mediaevalisms such as Body and Soul, and by the perhaps
scarcely less mythological segregations of Intellect, Emotion, Will. But
new facts (See the "Proceedings" of the Society for Psychical Research,
London, passim, and especially Vols. VII.-XV. For a valuable collection
of the phenomena of mysticism, see William James, "Varieties of
Religious Experience", Edinburgh, 1901-2.) are accumulating, facts about
the formation and flux of personality, and the relations between the
conscious and the sub-conscious. Any moment some great imagination may
leap out into the dark, touch the secret places of life, lay bare the
cardinal mystery of the marriage of the spatial with the non-spatial. It
is, I venture to think, towards the apprehension of such mysteries,
not by reason only, but by man's whole personality, that the religious
spirit in the course of its evolution through ancient magic and modern
mysticism is ever blindly yet persistently moving.

Be this as it may, it is by thinking of religion in the light of
evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a realite faite but as a
process, and it is so only, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real
patience and tolerance. We have ourselves perhaps learnt laboriously
something of the working of natural law, something of the limitations of
our human will, and we have therefore renounced the practice of magic.
Yet we are bidden by those in high places to pra