an events have taken a different
turn. Life does not adapt itself to preconceived logical systems. The
rationalistic method of adjusting religion to life failed because it
was based upon a false reconstruction of the rise and growth of
religion. However logical and plausible such a reconstruction might
have appeared, the fact that it could not be verified by study and
observation of religious phenomena invalidated the practical
inferences drawn from it.

_The Failure of the Rationalistic School_

ALTHOUGH by that time science had made sufficient strides to know how
futile it was to reconstruct fact by means of reason, the territory of
religion was still considered exempt from the need of resorting to
experience. The thinkers of the rationalistic age were to a certain
extent still under the dominance of the medieval regard for abstract
reasoning, and applied it to man's spiritual existence. They reasoned
thus: The human being is naturally gifted with an intuition that
enables him to discover for himself the truth about God and his
relation to the world. If man had only been left alone and had not had
the stream of his ideas muddied by outside interference, he would have
continued professing a religion that would have been both pure and
simple. But human depravity did not permit the natural religion of
primitive life to continue. The fanatics with their delusions and the
priests with their love of power distorted man's primitive faith in
God. They invented dogmas and practices by means of which they could
hold the masses in subjection. In course of time these extraneous
elements came to be looked upon as the main content of revealed
religion. The various established faiths and revealed religions were
little more than wilful fabrications that were bound to crumble before
the onslaughts of reason. Thus, by bringing the established cults into
disrepute, men like Voltaire and Hume hoped to restore religion to its
original state of purity and simplicity, bare of all artificialities
of forms and institutions.

However superficial the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing
but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service
it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is
indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the
impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers
of one faith from those of another. Rationalism began to lift the
curse of in