each type reaches
of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the
individual; and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the
channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the
cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind-cure form of
healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process.
The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How
long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when
one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of
amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary
whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject.

But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we
should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In
answering this question I must open again the general relations of the
theoretic to the active life.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what
Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism--that to understand the
causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be
drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes
and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were
qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge,
to be considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be
the man who found it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir
c'est tout pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many
persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make
one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of
one's living faith.[332] If religion be a function by which either
God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives
the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who
merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one
thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic
currents passing through your being, is another.

[332] Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.

For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for
living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a
science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely
theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them
cut by act