FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 451 



ibility. When recourse is had to a theory of divine accommodation, 

 the facts are treated more respectfully, but they are left where they 

 invite a more natural interpretation, and the divine "nature is 

 subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." If anything in 

 religion is revealed, all is revealed. There is, indeed, no objection to 

 the use of the term revelation if by it is meant the gradual unfolding 

 of the truth to man's religious consciousness. But as long as it sug- 

 gests an invidious and untenable distinction between different forms 

 of religion, or a miraculous communication of truth to man, it is wise 

 to avoid the term. 



It has been held that there is an essential difference between 

 ethnic religions and religions founded by eminent personalities in 

 respect of their origin and character. Such religions as Buddhism, 

 Mazdaism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have exercised so vast 

 an influence in the world, presented so marked a contrast with the 

 religions whence they departed, and have been to such a degree char- 

 acterized by veneration for their founders, that they have been felt 

 to be of a different order, having their origin not so much in the 

 common tendencies of man's religious nature as in the inspiration, 

 originality, and power of these mighty personalities. But this dis- 

 tinction is defective in two ways. It overestimates the originality 

 of a few great religious leaders, and it fails to recognize the significance 

 of the individual initiative in all forms of religion. The fact that great 

 emphasis has been placed by devoted followers on a personal relation 

 of reverence and obedience to such leaders as Gautama, Zarathushtra, 

 Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, amounting in the case of Gautama 

 and Jesus to divine adoration and mystic fellowship, and that a 

 mythical drapery has been placed about their majestic figures, seems 

 to single them out as belonging to a special category of men, who, 

 if they did not step directly from the sky bringing with them celestial 

 light for those sitting in the darkness, at least drew from unfathomable 

 depths within themselves things new and precious, fit to meet the 

 spiritual needs of mankind for all time. But when the mythical and 

 legendary element is removed and the historic facts are ascertained 

 as nearly as possible, it is seen that these men builded upon founda- 

 tions laid by others, and also that other builders followed them 

 without whom their work would have been less permanent. It is 

 then recognized that their reaction against prevailing tendencies 

 and traditions was but a stronger impulse in the same direction in 

 which myriads of other souls had moved, that they were only repre- 

 sentatives of that progressive element, that centrifugal force, that 

 tendency to vary from the type, which, in human history as else- 

 where in nature, forms the counterpart and supplement of the con- 

 servative element, the centripetal force, the tendency to preserve 

 the type. 



