In the first place we must endeavour to be faithful to the best ideal of our own party, of our own church or creed, to insist on the positive side of what it teaches rather than its negations. The true protestant, for instance, should be zealous to protest for a living ideal which he feels to correspond to his needs, and not, as too often has been the case in the past, merely to protest against evils and mistakes connected with another ideal.
Then realizing the vastness of truth, and the limitations of our own powers of apprehending it, we must be willing to recognize that there must be other aspects of truth which we, as individuals or as a religious community, have not yet apprehended, and that the whole truth must needs be too great for any human mind or system to express. This attitude of mind should surely be perfectly compatible with an enthusiastic loyalty to that vision of the truth which has been given to us or our community, and with a desire to share this vision with others. [p.10]
To attempt to surrender our own expression of the Truth as we see it, and replace it by an expression drawn from the vision of others is to make in the inner life an error like that of the school of Bologna in painting. The Caracci and their followers deliberately aimed at acquiring the peculiar excellencies of each of the great masters who preceded them, the harmonies of Raphael, the colour of Titian, the vigour and the grandiose forms of Michael Angelo. They hoped to combine all these and thus achieve a higher perfection than their masters, but in so doing they failed to express themselves in their own way, for they were always painting things as they imagined they ought to see them, and not as they really saw them.
The great artist, like Rembrandt, will honour and admire a Raphael or a Correggio without seeking to imitate them or to borrow their technique. And so while we recognise the vision of truth that comes to men of different views from our own, we must not abandon our own vision, or our attempt to express it faithfully, because we know that we see a part and not the whole.
Every great religious movement has been in its origin or at its highest point universal in its aspiration, claiming to make appeal to all mankind and to become at length the religion of the whole world. And it is this very universal claim which seems to some dispassionate critics so narrow- spirited and fanatical, which bears witness to the force and reality of that deepest religious life [p.11] which underlies all difference of dogma, and finds its expression in all these varying faiths. At the moment of its budding forth, the tiny twig feels within it the expanding life of the whole tree. "I am the true tree, and the tree that is to be." it may be imagined as saying; though the great boughs above it do not stir in the wind that shakes it to and fro. The twig may have within it the possibility of growth to a size exceeding the stem from which it now springs, or it may remain only a twig; but in either case it is a part of the tree, and in a sense it is the tree; its life is the tree's life. So every great religious movement, when at its best and highest, looks forward to world-wide extension; it may be that the flood of life takes new channels and only a tiny sect remains to bear witness to what has been, but yet, when its members were filled with their first enthusiasm, and went forth into the world to win others to their views, they were strong because somehow or other they had come into touch with the eternal; their creed and organisation may have corresponded only to the need of the day, and of a limited number of people, or it may have been of wider application and able to endure for a longer time, but in spite of these limitations, the creed and organisation represent an inner life through which their members came into touch with the source of all life and strength.