The Science of Religion

This book is intended to give, in bare outline, what we should understand by religion, in order to make it universally and pragmatically necessary. It also seeks to present that aspect of the idea of the God-head which has a direct bearing on the motives and actions of every minute of our lives. It is true that God is Infinite in His nature and aspect, and it is also true that to prepare a chart detailing, so far as is consistent with reason, what God is like is only an evidence of the limitations of the human mind in its attempt to fathom God. Still it is equally true that the human mind, in spite of all its drawbacks, can not rest perfectly satisfied with what is finite. It has a natural urge to interpret what is human and finite in the light of what is super-human and infinite,— what it feels but can not express, what within it lies implicit but under circumstances refuses to be explicit.

This book includes the following chapters:

I. The Universality, Necessity, and Oneness of Religion: The Distinction between Pleasure, Pain, and Bliss: God

II. Four Fundamental Religious Methods

III. Instruments of Knowledge: Religious Point of View