our feet. And all this by the simple process of putting them side by side.
Can we, however, rest content in the assumption that so vast a superstructure as that of religion has no solid foundation in the mind of man? And is it destined, like the theologies it has evolved in the course of its existence to disappear entirely from a world enlightened by scientific knowledge?
Two questions must be carefully distinguished from one another in replying to the doubt thus suggested. The first is whether religion, although it may contain no objective truth, or no objective truth ascertainable by us, nevertheless possesses, from some circumstance in its own nature, or in the nature of the world we live in, a hold upon the human race, of which it cannot by any advance of knowledge be deprived. Is there, in short, if not an everlasting truth, yet an everlasting dream from which there is to be no awakening, and in which spectral shapes do duty for external realities? An affirmative reply would admit the existence of religious sentiment to be a necessary result of the constitution of the human mind, but would not concede the inference that conclusions reached by means of that sentiment had any objective validity, or any intellectual worth beyond that which they derive from the imagination of those who believe them. The second question is whether there are in the fundamental composition of religious sentiment any elements not only necessary, but true; and if so, what those elements are, and what is the proof of their credibility, if proof there be.
As a preliminary to answering either of these questions, it is needful to ascertain whether in the midst of the variety we have passed in review, there is any fundamental unity; in other words, whether the varied forms of religion are all we can ever know of it, or whether underlying those forms there is a permanent structure upon which they are superposed. For only when we know whether there is in all the creeds of the world a common element, can we proceed to inquire whether there is an element which is a necessary result of the constitution of our minds. If the phenomena evinced by the several religions to which we have referred in the previous book have no common source in human nature; if, while they differ in every
