2.14. OF OTHER RELIGIONS.

In the same manner, in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a
measure true. Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae,
because they seem to stand not on common experience but on those
intellectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys.
Transmigration of souls without a continuing memory is to my mind utter
foolishness, the imagining of a race of children. The aggression,
discipline and submission of Mahommedanism makes, I think, an
intellectually limited but fine and honourable religion--for men. Its
spirit if not its formulae is abundantly present in our modern world.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example, manifestly preaches a Mahommedan God,
a modernised God with a taste for engineering. I have no doubt that in
devotion to a virile, almost national Deity and to the service of His
Empire of stern Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have found and
will find Salvation.

All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true
thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they
have served a purpose, they have worked. Men and women have lived in and
by them. Men and women still do. Only they are not true for me to live
in them. I have, I believe, to live in a new edifice of my own
discovery. They do not work for me.

These schemes are true, and also these schemes are false! in the sense
that new things, new phrasings, have to replace them.


2.15.