INTRO D UCTOR Y 247 



through more and more social stages of religious feeling 

 to the Eucharist and the doctrine of the Atonement. 

 In neither case do we touch the absolute ; the current 

 religion and the current morality are not what the 

 philosophers and theologians of the time describe them 

 in their treatises ; they are entirely relative to the habits 

 and instincts of the great masses of the people. Nay, 

 even the ' absolute ' morality and the refined religious 

 doctrines of the thinkers of one age are seen by the 

 critical minds of a later generation to be but idealised 

 forms of the folk - religion and folk - morality of the 

 same period. The relativity to the age and to its special 

 aspirations is still to be found if it be glossed with 

 greater verbal subtleties, and if the popular trimming 

 of creed to current economic and social needs be less 

 grossly obvious. To the unprejudiced student of com- 

 parative religion, the Christianity of Jesus is as widely 

 removed from that of Tertullian or of Augustine as 

 these are removed from the Christianity of the Middle 

 Ages. Such a dispassionate inquirer will find almost 

 more unity of ideas, dogmatic and artistic, between 

 mediaeval folk-Christianity and modern Burmese Bud- 

 dhism than between the former and the popular mani- 

 festations of Christianity to-day. The great lessons of 

 comparative religion have, hitherto, been principally 

 based on a study of oriental religions, and their com- 

 parison with Christian doctrines. But one of the chief 

 of these lessons, the relativity of all religious belief to 

 the social and artistic conditions under which the belief 

 flourishes, can easily be learnt within the history of 

 Christianity itself. From our earliest childhood the 



