INTERPRETATIONS POETRY AND RELIGION -- PREFACE -- THE following volume is composed of a number 3f papers written at various times and already partially printed they are now revised and gathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, from somewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea is that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called refigion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry. It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the confiicta of religion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of tihe impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of reality, and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For the dignity of religion, like that of poetry and of every moral ideal, lies pre eisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of v the meanings and values of life, in its anticipation of perfection so that the excellenue of religion is due to an idealization of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makea it necessarily false if treated as science. Its fun tion is rather to draw from reality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we crave. It also follows from OIU general conception that poetry has a universal and amoral function. Its rudimentary essays in the region of fancy and pleasant sound, as well as its idealization of episodes in human existence, are only partial exercises in an art that has all time and all experience for its natural subjecbmatter and all the possibilities of being for its ultimate theme. As religion is deflected from its course when it is confused with a record of facts or of natural laws, so poetry is arrested in its development if it remains as un meaning play of fancy without relevance to the ideals and purposes of life. In that relevance lies ite highest power. As its elementary pleasantness comes from its response to the demands of the ear, so its deepest beauty comes from ite response to the ultimate demhds of the soul. This theory cm hardly hope for much commen dation either from the apologists of theology or from its critics. The mass of mankind ir divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quix-L otes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expe dient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, - and this is d l we propose, - although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination. If, therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy should be offended at our conception, which would reduce his artful cosmos to an allegory, all that could be said to mitigate his displeasure would be that our view is even less favourable to his opponents than to himself. The liberal school that attempts to fortify r e ligion by minimizing its expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems from this point of view to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizingreligious aims it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition...