ave collected all that is dull in them. All the
colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white. Mixed
together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
thing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something
much worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the
Thugs. The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the
misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts commonly
counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted bad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
it in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate all
their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.
This will often happen to us in connection with human religions. Take
two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy of the
nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy of
Auguste Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is expressed
in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they do a great deal of
good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style; their aims are
excellent, but their methods are wrong." To me, unfortunately, the
precise reverse of this appears to be the truth. I do not know whether
the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent, but I am quite sure their
methods are admirable. Their methods are the methods of all intense and
hearty religions; they are popular like all religion, military like all
religion, public and sensational like all religion. They are not
reverent any more than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in
the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only
possible to infidels. That beautiful twilight you will find in
Euripides, in Renan, in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will
not find it--you will find only laughter and war. A man cannot pay
that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be
reverent towards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation Army, though their
voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are
really the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of
Dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for
a philosophy. Professor Huxley, in one of his clev