as lost and is losing by this error!
Just as vice, which is an exercise of function without purpose, wastes
the body until it becomes diseased, so imagination unsustained by
truth consumes the intelligence until it assumes characteristics akin
to the mental characteristics of the insane.

* * * * *

=Fable and religion=.--I have frequently heard it said that the
education of the imagination on a basis of fancy prepares the soul of
the child for religious education; and that an education based on
"reality," as in this method we would adopt, is too arid, and tends to
dry up the founts of spiritual life. Such reasoning, however, will not
be accepted by religious persons. They know well that faith and fable
are "as the poles apart," since fable is in itself a thing without
faith, and faith is the very sentiment of truth, which should
accompany man even unto death. Religion is not a product of fantastic
imagination, it is the greatest of realities, the one truth to the
religious man. It is the fount and basis of his life. The man without
religion is not, certainly, a person without imagination, but rather
one who lacks internal equilibrium; compared with the religious man he
is less calm, less strong in adversity; not only this, but he is more
unsettled in his own ideas. He is weaker and more unhappy; and it is
in vain that he catches at imagination to create a world for himself
outside reality. Something within him cries aloud in the words of
David: "My soul is a-thirst for God." And if he hopes to reach the
goal of his real life by the help of imagination alone, he may feel
his feet giving way among quicksands at a supreme moment of effort.

When an apostle seeks to win a soul to religion, where man may plant
his faltering feet on a rock, he appeals to understanding, not to
imagination, for he knows that his task is not to create something,
but to call aloud to that which is slumbering in the depths of the
heart. He knows that he must shake off the torpor from a feeble life
as he would shake the snow from a living body buried in a drift, not
build up a puppet of ice which will melt under the rays of the sun.

It is true that fantastic imagination penetrates religion, but in the
guise of error. In the Middle Ages, for instance, epidemics were
ascribed with great simplicity, to a direct act of divine
chastisement; to-day they are attributed to the direct action of
microbes. Papin's steam machines suggeste