s
if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character,
taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and
mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced
thereby:--just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of
pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt
theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.

Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than
nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they
were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.

So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our
pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of
theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the
fruits of other men's religion, yet this very standard has been
begotten out of the drift of common life. It is the voice of human
experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand
athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing.
Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of
those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the
experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and
the charge may be neglected.

If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that
there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method.
The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose
demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one
another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test
saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide
how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human
activity. If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may
inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they
will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human
working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit,
and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs;
and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to
admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved
itself in any other way. Religions have APPROVED themselves; they have
ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they
violated other needs too