[288] Compare Professor W. Wallace's Gifford Lectures, in
Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and
inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and
metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by
the adherents of another. Of late, impartial classifications and
comparisons have become possible, alongside of the denunciations
and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used
exclusively to be carried on. We have the beginnings of a
"Science of Religions," so-called; and if these lectures could
ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I
should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be
constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate
experiences as their subject-matter. They are interpretative and
inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon
religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of
what it ascertains.
The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit
pretends to be something altogether different from this.
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