Men like Schleiermacher and Opzoomer argue strenuously that religion is feeling and not knowledge or practice; but it is expressly on the ground that, as there can be what is called religious knowledge and practice without piety, the knowledge is a mere antecedent, and the practice a mere consequent. Those, again, who make religion consist essentially in an act of will, in the self-surrender of the soul to the object of its worship, do so, they tell us, because pious feeling, even though based on knowledge, is only religiousness, not religion--the capacity of being religious, not actually being so; and religion only exists as a reality, a completed thing, when the will of man submits itself to the Divine Will. But this is to acknowledge, you observe, that both thought and feeling are present and presupposed wherever religion exists. Now, if the facts be as I have just stated, obviously the controversy as to whether religion is essentially knowing, feeling, or willing, is mainly verbal. It turns on an undefined use of the term essential. Thought, feeling, and will--knowledge, affection, and self-surrender--are admitted to be indissolubly united, inseparably present, in religion, even by those who will not admit them to be all its equally essential constituents. But in these circumstances, they should carefully explain what they mean by essential and non-essential, and tell us how we are to distinguish among inseparable states those which are essential from those which are non-essential. This they never do; this they cannot do. All facts which always go together, and are always equally found in any state or process, are its equally essential components. When we always find certain elements together, and can neither discover nor imagine them apart, we have no right to represent some of them as essential to the compound into which they enter, and others as non-essential. They are all essential.