th such ideal pictures
as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find
the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is
suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen
and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with
material for conceptions of beings more awful than they _can_ have
known on earth, and more excellent than they probably _have_ known.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Henry Holt & Co.),
pp. 103-04.]

In his religion, Mill maintains, man thus finds the fulfillment
of unfulfilled desire. Religion is thus conceived as an imaginative
enterprise of a very high and satisfying kind. It
peoples the world with perfections, not true perhaps to actual
experience, but true to man's highest aspirations. It gives
man companionship with divinity at least in imagination.
It enables him to live, at least spiritually, in such a universe as
his highest hopes and desires would have him live in, in fact.
It must be pointed out, however, that the devoutly religious
do not regard their God as a beautiful fiction, but as a dear
reality whom they can serenely trust and love, and whose
existence is the certain faith by which they live.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SCIENCE. It has
already been pointed out that theology is the reasoned formulation
of the religious experience which comes to men with
varying degrees of intensity, or the revelation by which some
man, a Moses or a Mohammed, has been inspired. Such a
formulation has a dual importance. For the individual it
brings clarity, order, and stability into his religious experience.
For the group, it makes possible the social transmission of
religious conceptions and ideals.

Reason in a man's religion, as in any other experience, introduces
stability, consistency, and order. It makes distinctions;
it resolves doubts, confusions, and uncertainties. It
is true that there have been in religion, as in politics and
morals, rebels against reason. There have been mystics who
preferred their warm ecstatic visions to the cold formulations
and abstractions of theology. But there have been, on the
other hand, those gifted or handicapped, according to one's
point of view, by an insistence on reason as well as rapture in
their religion. These have not been satisfied with an intuition
of God. They have wished to know God, as the highest
possible object of knowledge. Thus in th