ut the safe thing is surely to recognize that
all the insights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be
provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the
better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only "up to
date" and "on the whole." When larger ranges of truth open, it is
surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered
by our previous pretensions. "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the
gods arrive."

The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore
entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the
irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question
awaits us, the question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to
be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same
religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same
leadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and
soft, for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded
and despairing, exactly the same religious incentives are required? Or
are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to
different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a
religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for
one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I
think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so,
how can any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the
religion by which his own needs are best met? He aspires to
impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some
degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those
fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most
nourishing to HIM.

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound.
Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of
the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment
until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do
indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given
day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such
matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this
dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual
instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I
fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wh