nown, that I shall venture to print it
entire.

A creed or catechism is, of course, not at all the same thing as the
real religion of those who subscribe to it. The rules of metre are not
the same thing as poetry; the rules of cricket, if the analogy may be
excused, are not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man states in
his creed only the articles which he thinks it right to assert
positively against those who think otherwise. His deepest and most
practical beliefs are those on which he acts without question, which
have never occurred to him as being open to doubt. If you take on the
one hand a number of persons who have accepted the same creed but lived
in markedly different ages and societies, with markedly different
standards of thought and conduct, and on the other an equal number who
profess different creeds but live in the same general environment, I
think there will probably be more real identity of religion in the
latter group. Take three orthodox Christians, enlightened according to
the standards of their time, in the fourth, the sixteenth, and the
twentieth centuries respectively, I think you will find more profound
differences of religion between them than between a Methodist, a
Catholic, a Freethinker, and even perhaps a well-educated Buddhist or
Brahmin at the present day, provided you take the most generally
enlightened representatives of each class. Still, when a student is
trying to understand the inner religion of the ancients, he realizes how
immensely valuable a creed or even a regular liturgy would be.

Literature enables us sometimes to approach pretty close, in various
ways, to the minds of certain of the great men of antiquity, and
understand how they thought and felt about a good many subjects. At
times one of these subjects is the accepted religion of their society;
we can see how they criticized it or rejected it. But it is very hard to
know from their reaction against it what that accepted religion really
was. Who, for instance, knows Herodotus's religion? He talks in his
penetrating and garrulous way, 'sometimes for children and sometimes for
philosophers,' as Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but at
the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this
subject. No doubt his profession as a reciter and story-teller prevented
him. We can see that Thucydides was sceptical; but can we fully see what
his scepticism was directed against, or where, for instanc