"Genial tolerance," "mild indifferentism," -the Spirit of Truth has no part in these. We needs must "track, and try, and test," only not by turning away from anything which the mind and heart of our race has produced. This is why the task of the sincere religious thinker is so hard. In all beliefs truth and error are closely intermingled. He will have to do his best to separate the truth from the error, so that the truth may shine as much as possible in freedom from the obstructing influence of its combination with the error. If he destroys, he must at the same time create, just as all real growth involves destruction and creation, or has a negative and a positive side.

Related to the result which we have reached is a twofold principle which may be suggested by a passage from Browning, who gives perhaps its most forcible expression. I refer to the Pope's famous soliloquy on the incapacity of Language:

'Expect nor question nor reply

At what we figure as God's judgment bar!
None of this vile way by the barren words

Which, more than any deed, characterise
Man as made subject to a curse.

Why, can he tell you what a rose is like,
Or how the birds fly, and not slip to false
Though truth serve better? Man must tell his mate

Of you, me, and himself, knowing he lies,

Knowing his fellow knows the same—will think

He lies, it is the method of a man!'

Therefore these filthy rags of speech, this coil

Of statement, comment, query, and response,
Tatters all to contaminate for use,

Have no renewing: He, the Truth, is, too,
The Word. We men, in our degree, may know
There, simply, instantaneously, as here
After long time and amid many lies."

Here we touch on one of Browning's favourite thoughts, expressed by him in many ways. In Sordello, it is said that

Perceptions whole reject so pure a work of thought as language"; and Sordello, when he tries to express his infinite dreams and desires in words, finds language only a "makeshift," the "bravest of expedients." When the Pope would put into words his own deepest convictions, he finds that "speech babbles thus"; and Rabbi Ben Ezra tells us of "fancies which break through language and escape, and yet help to make up what we are worth to God." We describe our

feelings and ideas in words which cannot convey them; and we are obliged to accept the expressions and act upon them as if they were perfect, while we know that they are not. Hence the Pope's paradox: “He lies, it is the method of a man."

When

All who have come in contact with written or oral discussions on religious, theological, or philosophical matters, will have noticed one thing above all else: how sometimes confusion reigns supreme solely through verbal misunderstandings. a number of persons are "exchanging ideas," as we say, on these difficult subjects, the most which may be hoped for--not that it is a small thing-is that the ideas shall be really exchanged": that each person shall learn to understand the others' point of view, receiving their real thoughts into his own mind, and that he shall get his own thoughts expressed in such a way that the others can receive them in return. The more unaccustomed we are to thinking and speaking about the subjects in question, the harder it is for us to arrive at this mutual understanding. The topics lie outside our

common, everyday ways of thinking. The difficulty in discussing them has the twofold source that Browning speaks of language can never mean quite the same for different minds; and in certain cases it is impossible to get our real meaning properly expressed in language. Let us look at the first of these more carefully.

It is possible for people to fancy that they are thinking about a thing, when in reality they are no more thinking about it than if they were asleep and dreaming of it. It is possible for people to fancy that they are exchanging thoughts, when in reality they are only comparing their mental pictures. These "mental images as the psychologists call them are really memories of things perceived by our senses, memories combined in new ways. The images formed by different minds may, of course, roughly resemble one another, and hence may be compared by means of language, when the words stand for mental pictures rather than for thoughts. This has been called "picture thinking." But in real thinking, the mind grasps not merely some

kind of image or picture of a thing; it grasps the relations between the parts which make up that picture-its intellectual plan or scheme. So far as we are able to do this, we begin to understand the thing; and it is possible for such thoughts to agree perfectly, to be identically the same, though in different minds.

Picture-thinking and real thinking are always mingled together in our minds; hence it is so hard for words to mean the same for us all, so long as we are only human beings. While their meanings form part of ordinary experience, they get rubbed round, so to speak, into being practically the same for all minds; but where the facts which the words refer to are unfamiliar, the great difficulty is to get them to suggest the same thoughts to different people.

We have seen that the fixed expression of thought in language may be inadequate to the thought itself; and it is also true that the thought may be inadequate to the reality which it endeavours to express. This principle has more far-reaching consequences