RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 13 



good and others as wholly bad ; but shall rather lean to the 

 more defensible position that none are completely right and 

 none are completely wrong. 



Preserving, as far as may be, this impartial attitude, let 

 us then contemplate the two sides of this great controversy. 

 Keeping guard against the bias of education and shutting 

 out the whisperings of sectarian feeling, let us consider what 

 are the a priori probabilities in favour of each party. 



4. When duly realized, the general principle above 

 illustrated must lead us to anticipate that the diverse forms 

 of religious belief which have existed and which still exist, 

 have all a basis in some ultimate fact. Judging by analogy 

 the implication is, not that any one of them is altogether 

 right ; but that in each there is something right more or less 

 disguised by other things wrong. It may be that the soul 

 of truth contained in erroneous creeds is very unlike most, if 

 not all, of its several embodiments; and indeed, if, as we 

 jhave good reason to expect, it is much more abstract than 

 any of them, its unlikeness necessarily follows. But how- 

 ever different from its concrete expressions, some essential 

 verity must be looked for. To suppose that these multi- 

 form conceptions should be one and all absolutely ground- 

 less, discredits too profoundly that average human intel- 

 ligence from which all our individual intelligences are 

 inherited. 



This most general reason we shall find enforced by other 

 more special ones. To the presumption that a number of 

 diverse beliefs of the same class have some common founda- 

 tion in fact, must in this case be added a further presump- 

 tion derived from the omnipresence of the beliefs. Reli- 

 gious ideas of one kind or other are almost universal. Ad- 

 mitting that in many places there are tribes who have no 

 theory of creation, no word for a deity, no propitiatory acts, 

 no idea of another life admitting that only when a certain 

 phase of intelligence is reached do the most rudimentary 



