In the same manner, in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a measure true.  Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae, because they seem to stand not on common experience but on those intellectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys.  Transmigration of souls without a continuing memory is to my mind utter foolishness, the imagining of a race of children.  The aggression, discipline and submission of Mahommedanism makes, I think, an intellectually limited but fine and honourable religion—­for men.  Its spirit if not its formulae is abundantly present in our modern world.  Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example, manifestly preaches a Mahommedan God, a modernised God with a taste for engineering.  I have no doubt that in devotion to a virile, almost national Deity and to the service of His Empire of stern Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have found and will find Salvation.

All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing.  There they are, and they have served a purpose, they have worked.  Men and women have lived in and by them.  Men and women still do.  Only they are not true for me to live in them.  I have, I believe, to live in a new edifice of my own discovery.  They do not work for me.

These schemes are true, and also these schemes are false! in the sense that new things, new phrasings, have to replace them.

2.15.

Such are the essential beliefs by which I express myself.  But now comes the practical outcome of these things, and that is to discuss and show how upon this metaphysical basis and these beliefs, and in obedience to the ruling motive that arises with them, I frame principles of conduct.

BOOK THE THIRD.

Of general conduct.

3.1.  Conduct follows from belief.

I hold that the broad direction of conduct follows necessarily from belief.  The believer does not require rewards and punishments to direct him to the right.  Motive and idea are not so separable.  To believe truly is to want to do right.  To get salvation is to be unified by a comprehending idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive.

The believer wants to do right, he naturally and necessarily seeks to do right.  If he fails to do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead of right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he naturally and cheerfully does his best to correct his error.  He can be damned only by the fading and loss of his belief.  And naturally he recurs to and refreshes his belief.

I write in phrases that the evangelical Christianity of my childhood made familiar to me, because they are the most expressive phrases I have ever met for the psychological facts with which I am dealing.

But faith, though it banishes fear and despair and brings with it a real prevailing desire to know and do the Good, does not in itself determine what is the Good or supply any simple guide to the choice between alternatives.  If it did, there would be nothing more to be said, this book upon conduct would be unnecessary.