must be noted again
that the experience is primary. If men had not first had the
experience of religion, they would not have reflected about it.
Every contact of the individual with the world to some degree
arouses emotion and provokes thought. It is not different
with religion. That theologies should differ and conflict is not
surprising. No two individuals, no two groups or ages have
precisely the same experiences of the world, and their reasonings
upon their religious feelings are bound to differ, overlap,
and at times to conflict. The variety of world views are
testimony to the genuineness of the religious experience as it
fulfills the different needs, emotions, and desires of different
ages, groups, and generations of men.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE DIVINE. Reasonings upon religion
exhibit, like the religious emotions, certain recurrent features.
There is, in the first place, a certain universality in the
description of the objects of veneration. These are nearly always
regarded as self-sufficient in contrast with man. Man
seeks, strives, desires, has partial triumphs and pitiful failures,
is always in travail after some ideal. His life is incomplete;
at best it is a high aspiration; it is never really fulfilled.
But divinity has nearly always been regarded as seeking
nothing, asking nothing, needing nothing. This is what
infinity in practical terms means. And, with certain
exceptions presently to be noted, the divine power has always
been regarded as infinite. Thus Aristotle says that in man's
best moments, when he lives in reflection a life of self-sufficiency,
he lives just such a life as God lives continually. And
Plato describes the philosopher as a man who because he can
live, at least temporarily, amid eternal, changeless beauty
and truth, "lives in recollection among those things among
which God always abides, and in beholding which God is
what he is." Lucretius also gives a simple picture of the
even calmness and still, even security of the life of the gods
as he and all the Epicureans conceived it. Tennyson paraphrases
the picture:

"...The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Tennyson: _Lucretius_.]

Divinity has, again, quite universally been r