e characteristic
marks. In the first place, religion essentially deals with the uncharted
region of human experience. A large part of human life has been
thoroughly surveyed and explored; we understand the causes at work; and
we are not bewildered by the problems. That is the domain of positive
knowledge. But all round us on every side there is an uncharted region,
just fragments of the fringe of it explored, and those imperfectly; it
is with this that religion deals. And secondly we may note that religion
deals with its own province not tentatively, by the normal methods of
patient intellectual research, but directly, and by methods of emotion
or sub-conscious apprehension. Agriculture, for instance, used to be
entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of
science. In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would
probably assume that the barrenness was due to 'pollution', or offence
somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offences, or at any
rate those of his neighbours and ancestors, and when he eventually
decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all
be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the
soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the
imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man
in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at
any rate in the earlier stages; he would say it was a case for deeper
ploughing or for basic slag. Later on, if disaster followed disaster
till he began to feel himself a marked man, even the average modern
would, I think, begin instinctively to reflect upon his sins. A third
characteristic flows from the first. The uncharted region surrounds us
on every side and is apparently infinite; consequently, when once the
things of the uncharted region are admitted as factors in our ordinary
conduct of life they are apt to be infinite factors, overruling and
swamping all others. The thing that religion forbids is a thing never to
be done; not all the inducements that this life can offer weigh at all
in the balance. Indeed there is no balance. The man who makes terms with
his conscience is essentially non-religious; the religious man knows
that it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world and
lose his stake in the infinite and eternal.[6:1]

Am I going to draw no distinction then between religion and mere
supersti