The Sphere of Religion 263 



to work with interest in the curiosities of history and the aberrations 

 of the human mind. 



As these interests are unfortunately more easily satisfied by 

 what we may call the psychological imagination than by patient 

 objective investigation, those who work with them are certain to 

 concern themselves more with the abnormal than the normal, and 

 to feel themselves more helped by the clever than the conscientious 

 labours of previous inquirers. The result is too frequently on the 

 same level of intellectual achievement as some studies of the mind 

 of Germany during the war, for which it was a disqualification to 

 have had experience of Germans by living in their country, or 

 sufficient interest in their minds to have mastered their language. 



In the study of religion, as in all other subjects, as a wise Greek 

 has said, " Not to know what was done in the world before we 

 were born is always to remain a child." In this also, as in all other 

 subjects, lack of bias is not to be won by the easy method of lack of 

 interest. Lack of bias is not an absence of interest or even of 

 experience, but a very active interest in truth, which requires so 

 high a sense of the value of the subject that no labour or cost 

 can be esteemed too great a price to pay for knowing the truth 

 about it. Lack of interest, moreover, in a subject which deserves 

 interest is itself bias and is sure to overlook or distort the facts to 

 be considered. 



Some religious people, it is true, have too frequently given 

 cause for thinking that interest in religion is mere prepossession. 

 They fail to realise that truth is the supreme religious interest, and 

 they even seem at times to treat religion as a sort of germ which 

 would die in the sunlight. But this does not disprove the fact that 

 we cannot know an environment without interest in it, and we 

 cannot know it is a reality without that interest being concern to 

 know the truth about it. Moreover, a study which lacks interest 

 in its own sphere exposes us to the still more serious danger of 

 confusing the subject with the things in which we are interested, 

 because, not being able to occupy ourselves long with what does 

 not interest us, we must introduce what does, however irrelevant 

 it may be. Thus persons who lack interest in poetry treat it as 

 epigram or rhetoric or philosophy. And, in the same way, 

 persons not interested in religion treat it as a kind of science, or as 

 a popular philosophy, or as a useful buttress of morality, or as a 

 bond of the social order. This is no rare occurrence, and few 



