tion? Not at present. Later on we may perhaps see some way to
it. Superstition is the name given to a low or bad form of religion, to
the kind of religion we disapprove. The line of division, if we made
one, would be only an arbitrary bar thrust across a highly complex and
continuous process.

Does this amount to an implication that all the religions that have
existed in the world are false? Not so. It is obvious indeed that most,
if analysed into intellectual beliefs, are false; and I suppose that a
thoroughly orthodox member of any one of the million religious bodies
that exist in the world must be clear in his mind that the other million
minus one are wrong, if not wickedly wrong. That, I think, we must be
clear about. Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation
towards the uncharted, the mysterious, tracts of life which surround him
on every side. And for my own part I am content to say that his method
must be to a large extent very much what St. Paul calls +pistis+ or
faith: that is, some attitude not of the conscious intellect but of the
whole being, using all its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and
most inarticulate feelers and tentacles, in the effort somehow to touch
by these that which cannot be grasped by the definite senses or analysed
by the conscious reason. What we gain thus is an insecure but a precious
possession. We gain no dogma, at least no safe dogma, but we gain much
more. We gain something hard to define, which lies at the heart not only
of religion, but of art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human
emotion. I believe that at times we actually gain practical guidance in
some questions where experience and argument fail.[8:1] That is a great
work left for religion, but we must always remember two things about it:
first, that the liability to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite;
and second, that the results of confident error are very terrible.
Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a
large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and
I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day.
All the Middle Ages held the strange and, to our judgement, the
obviously insane belief that the normal result of religious error was
eternal punishment. And yet by the crimes to which that false belief led
them they almost proved the truth of something very like it. The record
of early Christian and medieval pe