Page:What We Want.djvu/19

 Religion is the original and independent form of experience through which alone a satisfying metaphysic can be gradually established. But the prejudice of theologians has been to regard rellgion as dependent for its existence and preservation upon the guarantee of a previously revealed metaphysic. The authors of this Letter have very shrewdly pointed out that in practice religious teaching has always dispensed with its supposed metaphysical basis, and grounded itself in experience. Even the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Eucharist, the most metaphysical in their precise definition of all the doctrines of the Church, cannot be taught to simple souls save in terms of that actual religious experience out of which the doctrinal definitions originally grew.

Yet it may naturally be felt by some