Page:What Religion Is (1920).djvu/9

vi for. Everything depends on the expectation and the hope with which we approach it. Religion is the knot, the centre, of all human difficulties; it is a many-sided thing, and if we ask it the wrong questions it will give us misleading responses.

To take the simplest of all examples: Will religion guarantee me my private and personal happiness? To this, on the whole, I think we must answer No; and if we approach it with a view to such happiness, then most certainly and absolutely No. And yet this answer might repel many persons who are quite sincerely inclined to religion. They might perhaps rejoin, “Well, but if not that, then what? We esteem the thing as good and great, but if it simply does nothing for us, how is it to be anything to us?” But the answer