The separation was not violent. There was no sudden wrenching off. There were none of those painful struggles which many others have had to undergo when breaking away from the faith of their fathers. It was all a gradual, smooth transition, the unfolding of a seed that had long been planted. I have never felt the bitterness often characteristic of the radical, nor his vengeful impulse to retaliate upon those who had imposed the yoke of dogmas upon his soul. I had never worn the yoke. I had never been in bondage. I had been gently guided. And consequently the wine did not turn into vinegar, the love into hate. The truth is, I was hardly aware of the change that had taken place until it was fairly consummated. One day I awoke, and found that I had traveled into a new country. The landscape was different; the faces I encountered were different; and looking casually into a mental mirror, as it were, I perceived that I too had become different. And I was sure also that I had gained, not lost, that into my new spiritual home I had taken with me, not indeed the images of my gods, like Æneas, fleeing from Troy, but something for which those images had stood, and which in other ways would remain for me a permanent possession. It has been said that the science of today lives only in so far as it supersedes the science of yesterday. Whatever may be true of science (and the statement is certainly not true without large qualifications—the science of Newton and Darwin has not been “superseded”—and it may even come to pass that outreachings of a more ancient science frustrated at the time will hereafter be taken up anew with fairer results than formerly were attainable), in religion at all events there is no such thing as the bare substitution of the new for the old. The religions of the past, at least the more advanced religions, are not simply to be cast on the scrap heap, or treated as exploded superstitions. There is in all of them a certain fund of truth which may not be allowed to perish, but should be rescued out of the wreck. On the other hand, even the most advanced religions contain a large admixture of error, survivals of primitive taboos, mythological elements having their root in polytheism, while the very truths which I have just admitted to be infinitely precious require to be restated so as to fit them into a larger synthesis.