The severity of the
crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall
continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall
begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of
amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite
arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a
twice-born subject.
But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we
should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion?
In answering this question I must open again the general
relations of the theoretic to the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember
what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism--that to
understand the causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands
them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand
everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might
even decide which elements were qualified, by their general
harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true;
and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found
it hardest to be personally devout.
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