ghtened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism,which[TN-10]
makes God in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is
made in the image of God, belittles divinity to a creature of passions
and caprices? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes
out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad "good in the
making," and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence
of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the
absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a
religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for
religious longing?

The long story of religious effort is not from fetichism to monotheism,
as Comte read it; nor is its only possible goal inside the limits of the
ego, as Feuerbach and the other Neo-Hegelians assert; but it is on its
theoretical side to develope with greater and greater distinctness the
immeasurable reality of pure thought, to dispense more and more with the
quantification of the absolute, and to avoid in the representation of
that Being the use of the technic of concrete existence.

Little by little we learn that the really true is never true in fact,
that the really good is never good in act.[194-1] Carefully cherishing
this distinction taught by mathematics and ethics, the religious mind
learns to recognize in that only reality darkly seen through the glass
of material things, that which should fix and fill its meditations.
Passing beyond the domain of physical law, it occupies itself with that
which defines the conditions of law. It contemplates an eternal
activity, before which its own self-consciousness seems a flickering
shadow, yet in that contemplation is not lost but gains an evergrowing
personality.

This is the goal of religious striving, the hidden aim of the wars and
persecutions, the polemics and martyrdoms, which have so busied and
bloodied the world. This satisfies the rational postulates of religion.
Does some one say that it does not stimulate its emotional elements,
that it does not supply the impulses of action which must ever be the
criteria of the true faith? Is it not a religion at all, but a
philosophy, a search, or if you prefer, a love for the truth?

Let such doubter ponder well the signification of truth, its relation to
life, its identity with the good, and the paramount might of wisdom and
a clear understanding, and he will be ready to exclaim with th