§ 35. But neither religion nor any other human interest consists in essentials. Such a practical conviction as that which has been defined inevitably flowers into a marvelous complexity, and taps for its nourishment every spontaneity of human nature. If it be said that only the practical conviction is essential, this is not the same as to say that all else is superfluous. There may be no single utterance that my religion could not have spared, and yet were I to be altogether dumb my religion would, indeed, be as nothing. For if I believe, I accept a presence in my world, which as I live will figure in my dreams, or in my thoughts, or in my habits. And each of these expressions of myself will have a truth if it do but bear out my practical acceptance of that presence. The language of religion, like that of daily life, is not the language of science except it take it upon itself to be so. There is scarcely a sentence which I utter in my daily intercourse with men which is not guilty of transgressions against the canons of accurate and definite thinking. Yet if I deceive neither myself nor another, I am held to be truthful, even though my language deal with chance and accident, material purposes and spiritual causes, and though I vow that the sun smiles or the moon lets down her hair into the sea. Science is a special interest in the discovery of unequivocal and fixed conceptions, and employs its terms with an unalterable connotation. But no such algebra of thought is indispensable to life or conversation, and its lack is no proof of error. Such is the case also with that eminently living affair, religion. I may if I choose, and I will if my reasoning powers be at all awakened, be a theologian. But theology, like science, is a special intellectual spontaneity. St. Thomas, the master theologian, did not glide unwittingly from prayer into the _quæstiones_ of the "Summa Theologiæ," but turned to them as to a fresh adventure. Theology is inevitable, because humanly speaking adventure is inevitable. For man, with his intellectual spontaneity, every object is a problem; and did he not seek sooner or later to define salvation, there would be good reason to believe that he did not practically reckon with any. But this is _similarly_ and _independently_ true of the imagination, the most familiar means with which man clothes and vivifies his convictions, the exuberance with which he plays about them and delights to confess them. The imagination of religion, contributing what Matthew Arnold called its "poetry and eloquence," does not submit itself to such canons as are binding upon theology or science, but exists and flourishes in its own right.