“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this salutary doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to make our thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths conceived as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were always saying, I believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! A generation or so back, there was a slang phrase which was used to express incredulity; when you meant, ‘That is not true,’ you said, ‘I don’t think!’ My dear sisters and brothers, there was a vast deal of profound philosophy in that simple piece of slang! Mosenheim himself would not have had them express themselves otherwise. If there is no such thing as truth, and you may take it from me that there is not, except in a very special sense which it would take too long to explain to you now—if there is no such thing as truth, then we are not going to burn one another for denying that this or that is true. We are going to abandon Truth, and go forward boldly, none knows whither.
“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of it is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in hyper-egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the short-sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not bear upon my immediate difficulties.
I confess I was somewhat troubled by the tone of Bishop Dives’ utterance. It seemed to me to show all his old grasp of philosophical subtleties, but less than his old confidence in the claims of the supernatural. Could it be, I asked myself, that my oracle had himself changed with the change of the years, and gave forth now a different note? I was so troubled by this thought that I wrote again, asking him quite frankly to tell me if he thought his views were the same as when I knew him at Oxford, or different; and, if different, whether they had now reached a standstill, or whether they were still developing, and if so in what direction? His answer was a candid avowal:
_You have, with your usual directness and acumen, touched upon a point over which I have often questioned myself. Looking back over the years, it seems clear to me that my religious opinions have modified with time, and that, like the Greek poet long ago, “I grow old learning many things.” But, let it be observed, in these successive modifications of my point of view I am only following the example of what you and I recognize as being the Holy Catholic Church, which has learnt much, and, I think we may say, learned to forget much, since those early days when it seemed to dominate the world in the positiveness and self-assuredness of its youth._