In dealing with the applied science, then, we recover a liberty which the pure science does not enjoy. The science of religion is a historic science. Its student looks back upon the past; {3} and looks back upon it with a single purpose, that of discovering what, as a matter of fact, did happen, what was the order in which the events occurred. In so looking back he may, and does, see many things which he could wish had not occurred; but he has no power to alter them; he has no choice but to record them; and his duty, his single duty, is to ascertain the historic facts and to establish the historic truth. With the applied science the case is very different. There the student sets his face to the future, no longer to the past. The truths of pure science are the weapons placed in his hand with which he is to conquer the world. It is in the faith that the armour provided him by science is sure and will not fail him that he addresses himself to his chosen work. The implements are set in his hands. The liberty is his to employ them for what end he will. That liberty is a consequence of the fact that the student's object no longer is to ascertain the past, but to make the future. The business of the pure science is to ascertain the facts and state the truth. To what use the facts and truth are afterwards put, is a question with which the pure science has nothing to do. {4} The same facts may be put to very different uses: from the same facts very different conclusions may be drawn. The facts which the science of religion establishes may be used and are used for different and for contradictory purposes. The man who is agnostic or atheist uses them to support his atheism or agnosticism; or even, if he is so unwise, to prove it. The man who has religion is equally at liberty to use them in his support; and if he rarely does that, at any rate he still more rarely commits the mistake of imagining that the science of religion proves the truth of his particular views on the subject of religion. Indeed, his tendency is rather in the opposite direction: he is unreasonably uneasy and apt to have a disquieting alarm lest the science of religion may really be a danger to religion. This alarm may very naturally arise when he discovers that to the scientific student one religion is as another, and the question is indifferent whether there is any truth in any form. It is very easy to jump from these facts to the erroneous conclusion that science of religion is wholly incompatible with religious belief. And of course it is quite human and perfectly intelligible that that conclusion should be proclaimed aloud as correct {5} and inevitable by the man who, being an atheist, fights for what he feels to be the truth.