"O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, In a dry and weary land, where no water is. So have I looked upon thee in the sanctuary, To see thy power and thy glory. For thy loving-kindness is better than life; My lips shall praise thee." These are expressions of a hopeful faith; but, on the other hand, God may be addressed in terms of hatred and distrust. "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace. "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and implacable."[104:13] In either case there may be an indefinite degree of hyperbole. The language of love and hate, of confidence and despair, is not the language of description. In this train of the religious consciousness there is occasion for whatever eloquence man can feel, and whatever rhetorical luxuriance he can utter. [Sidenote: The Relation between Imagination and Truth in Religion.] § 37. Such considerations as these serve to account for the exercise and certain of the fruits of the religious imagination, and to designate the general criterion governing its propriety. But _how is one to determine the boundary between the imaginative and the cognitive_? It is commonly agreed that what religion says and does is not all intended literally. But when is expression of religion only poetry and eloquence, and when is it matter of conviction? If we revert again to the cognitive aspect of religion, it is evident that there is but one test to apply: _whatever either fortifies or misleads the will is literal conviction_. This test cannot be applied absolutely, because it can properly be applied only to the intention of an individual experience. However I may express my religion, that which I express, is, we have seen, an expectation. The degree to which I literally mean what I say is then the degree to which it determines my expectations. Whatever adds no item to these expectations, but only recognizes and vitalizes them, is pure imagination. But it follows that it is entirely impossible from direct inspection to define any given _expression_ of religious experience as myth, or to define the degree to which it is myth. It submits to such distinctions only when viewed from the stand-point of the concrete religious experience which it expresses. Any such given expression could easily be all imagination to one, and all conviction to another. Consider the passage which follows: