Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/81

 This procedure ends by basing religion on those few ideas which in the circumstances of the time are most effective in producing pleasing emotions and agreeable conduct. If our trust is in the ultimate power of reason as a discipline for the discernment of truth, we have no right to impose such a priori conditions. All simplifications of religious dogma are shipwrecked upon the rock of the problem of evil.

As a particular application, we may believe that the various doctrines about God have not suffered chiefly from their complexity. They have represented extremes of simplicity, so far as they have been formulated for the great rationalistic religions. The three extremes of simple notions should not represent in our eyes mutually exclusive concepts, from among which we are to choose one and reject the others.

It cannot be true that contradictory notions can apply to the same fact. Thus reconcilement of these cantrary concepts must