The following volume is composed of a number of papers written atvarious times and already partially printed; they are now revised andgathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, fromsomewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea isthat religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merelyin the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetryis called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when itmerely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.
It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrineswould do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with mattersof fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts ofreligion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies ofsects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religionin the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of reality,and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For thedignity of religion, like that of poetry and of every moral ideal, liesprecisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of the meaningsand values of life, in its anticipation of perfection; so that theexcellence of religion is due to an idealization of experience which,while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarilyfalse if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw fromreality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality oughtto conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world wecrave.
It also follows from our general conception that poetry has a universaland a moral function. Its rudimentary essays in the region of fancyand pleasant sound, as well as its idealization of episodes in humanexistence, are only partial exercises in an art that has all time andall experience for its natural subject-matter and all the possibilitiesof being for its ultimate theme. As religion is deflected from itscourse when it is confused with a record of facts or of natural laws,so poetry is arrested in its development if it remains an unmeaningplay of fancy without relevance to the ideals and purposes of life. Inthat relevance lies its highest power. As its elementary pleasantnesscomes from its response to the demands of the ear, so its deepestbeauty comes from its response to the ultimate demands of the soul.
This theory can hardly hope for much commendation either from theapologists of theology or from its critics. The mass of mankind isdivided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense forreality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals,but mad. The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and acceptingideals as ideals,—and this is all we propose,—although apparentlysimple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.If, therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy should be offended at ourconception, which would reduce his artful cosmos to an allegory, allthat could be said to mitigate his displeasure would be that our viewis even less favourable to his opponents than to himself.
The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimizingits expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems from this pointof view to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizingreligious aims; it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faithbecomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retainsonly a stark and superfluous principle of superstition. For meagre andabstract as may be the content of such