Absolute religious truth? How could there be such a thing? As well say
German was truer than French, or that Greek was more final than
Arabic. Its religion like its speech was the way the deepest instincts
of a race found expression, and like a language a religion was dead
when it ceased to change. Each religion gave the human soul something
great to love, to live by, and to die for. And whosoever lived in
joyous surrender to some greatness outside himself had religion, even
though the world called him atheist. The finest souls too easily
abandoned the best words to the stupidest people.
The time had come for a new religious expression, a new language for
the old everlasting emotions, in terms of the modern cosmos; a
religion that should contradict no fact and check no inquiry; so that
children should grow up again with no distracting divorce from their
parents and their past, with no break in the sweet sanctities of
childhood, which carry on to old age something of the freshness of
early sensation, and are a fount of tears in the desert of life.
The ever-living, darkly-laboring Hebraic spirit of love and righteous
aspiration, the Holy Ghost that had inspired Judaism and Christianity,
and moved equally in Mohammedanism and Protestantism, must now quicken
and inform the new learning, which still lay dead and foreign, outside
humanity.