Tout savoir c'est tout
pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many
persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge
may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the
acuteness of one's living faith.[332] If religion be a function
by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really
advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is
a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a
place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your
being, is another.
[332] Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.
For this reason, the science of religions may not be an
equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner
difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when
she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her
knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. To see
this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted
as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the
necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its
essence the same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago
pronounced.
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