All developed religions have their sacred books. Until the translation of the Sacred Books of the East was undertaken in the latter part of the nineteenth century, few people realized how many such books there were. And we Americans have been the unwilling witnesses of the appearance of two other collections of writings making the same claims, _The Book of Mormon_ and _Science and Health_. Now such sacred books are {62} regarded as revelations which could not be obtained except by a mysterious contact with divine things. And the religious faith which has been called forth and directed by a teaching founded on the scripture turns back its own warmth upon its source. Nothing is more natural than this interaction between a living faith and the writings which are felt to be its guarantee. Religion is notoriously conservative and retrospective. Especially is this true of religions which impute to themselves a complete and final source of revelation in the past. Faith and book are associated in the mind so intimately that they lose their separateness. To doubt one is like doubting the other. Thus faith forms an emotional envelope which protects the literature, while the concrete detail of the literature reacts upon the mind to strengthen the faith. It is not strange, therefore, that the cult of the book is a phenomenon which is universal in the advanced religions. The Mohammedan believes in the verbal inspiration of the Koran just as fully as does the Jew in the divine origin of the Old Testament, and the Christian in the inspiration of the accepted canon called the Bible. Nor are these the only examples. But this psychological circle is a vicious one. It involves the substitution of a subjective support to claims and theories which require the test of human experience as a whole. But just because science is this coordination of the whole range of experience, there inevitably arises that conflict between science and theology of which we have heard so much during the last few decades. It is a conflict between a part of experience, interpreted too hastily, and the rationalized whole.