will he at all infer, from your religion being true, that his own
must be false. Both are true, he thinks: all religions are true;
all gods are true gods; and all are _equally_ true. Neither can
he understand what you mean by a false religion, or how a religion
_could_ be false; and he is perfectly right. Wherever religions
consist only of a worship, as the Hindoo religion does, there can
be no competition amongst them as to truth. _That_ would be
an absurdity, not less nor other than it would be for a Prussian
to denounce the Austrian emperor, or an Austrian to denounce the
Prussian king, as a false sovereign. False! _How_ false? In
what sense false? Surely not as non-existing. But at least, (the
reader will reply,) if the religions contradict each other, one
of them _must_ be false. Yes; but _that_ is impossible.
Two religions cannot contradict each other, where both contain only
a _cultus_: they could come into collision only by means of a
doctrinal, or directly affirmative part, like those of Christianity
and Mahometanism. But this part is what no idolatrous religion
ever had, or will have. The reader must not understand me to mean
that, merely as a compromise of courtesy, two professors of different
idolatries would agree to recognise each other. Not at all. The
truth of one does not imply the falsehood of the other. Both are
true as _facts:_ neither can be false, in any higher sense,
because neither makes any pretence to truth doctrinal.

This distinction between a religion having merely a worship, and a
religion having also a body of doctrinal truth, is familiar to the
Mahometans; and they convey the distinction by a very appropriate
expression. Those majestic religions, (as they esteem them,) which
rise above the mere pomps and tympanies of ceremonial worship, they
denominate '_religions of the book_.' There are, of such