In these pages, little or no mention has been made of those great historic religions in whose name temples and cathedrals have been built, and throngs have been moved to worship and to war. This neglect has not been due to indifference: it will perhaps have been felt that these matters were present to the writer as the background against which the thought of the philosophers had to be portrayed if we were to gain insight into their motives and meanings. But our study was to be of those who had given reasons for the faith that was in them, or it might be for their lack of faith. This, the great swaying mass of humanity cannot be expected to do, and if the learned and thoughtful of its various communions have constantly tried to do it for their fellows, these studious devout minds are led by the very diligence of their reflection to interpret the formulas of the throng in a way the throng could not understand. Thus they too become philosophers, and for the depth and learning of their thought are as interesting as any of those here presented. It would be hard to find in history a clearer and more judicious mind than Thomas Aquinas. But because these theologians are in modern times the exponents of religious views that are widely spread in some manifest form or other, we may assume that they are familiar figures in the thoughts of men of our day and civilization. Wherefore it is of others, churchless and alone, with nothing but their personal writings to make their views known, yet religious in the object of their inquiry and in the conduct of their thought, that I have chosen to speak. The immense dialectic of the thought of these men has presented so many aspects of the religious problem that it must have left in the reader a sense of confusion if not of bewilderment. Such a baffled mood comes on every thoughtful student, not once, but again and again, as he reviews the past and tries to estimate the value of its gain; to consider what has definitely perished with its time, what perhaps marks development and points somewhither. Let me then suggest as well as may be done in a few words some things these men have put behind them and some things to which, with all their mutual opposition, they seem resultantly to point. * * * * * In the first place, their common assumption has been that the way of arriving at religious truth was by reason or experience, not by what is commonly called “revelation.” There is nothing new or modern in this attitude of mind. The earliest critics of popular religion share the feeling that (as Xenophanes wrote, in the sixth century B.C.): By no means at the beginning did the gods reveal all things to mortals, But mortals themselves, by inquiry, in time have made gradual progress.