LECTURE I NOTE I.—P. 17.

UNDOGMATIC RELIGION.

The type of view described in the text is too Common to need further characterization. I add one or two illustrations.

“To leave the religious idea in its more complete indeterminateness,” says Renan, “to hold at the same time to those two propositions: (l) ‘Religion will be eternal in humanity’; (2) ‘All religious symbols are assailable and perishable’; such, then, will be, if the opinion of the wise could he that of the majority, the true theology of our time. All those who labour to show, beyond the symbols, the pure sentiment which constitutes the soul of them, labour for the future. To what, in fact, will you attach religion, if this immortal basis does not suffice you?”—Fragments Philosophiques, p. 392.

Reville says: “If religions are mortal, religion never dies, or we may say, it dies under one form only to come to life again under another. There is then underneath and within this multicoloured development a permanent and substantial element, something stable and imperishable, which takes a firm hold on human nature itself.” —History of Religions, p. 3 (Eng. trans.).

M. Reville is a distinguished member of the Liberal Protestant party in France, whose programme was summed up thus in their organ, L’Emancipation: “A Church without a priesthood; a religion without a catechism; a morality without dogmatics; a God without an obligatory system.”