Do you still wonder at polytheism or at mythology? Why, they are inevitable. They are, if you like, a _parler enfantin_ of religion. But the world has its childhood, and when it was a child, it spoke as a child, it understood as a child, it thought as a child, and in that it spoke as a child its language was true. The fault rests with us, if we insist on taking the language of children for the language of men, if we attempt to translate literally ancient into modern language, Oriental into Occidental speech, poetry into prose. _Science of Religion._ Religion is inevitable if only we are left in possession of our senses, such as we really find them, not such as they have been defined for us. We claim no special faculty, no special revelation. The only faculty we claim is perception, the only revelation we claim is history, or, as it is now called, historical evolution. But let it not be supposed that we find the idea of the Infinite ready made in the human mind from the very beginning of our history. All we maintain is that the germ or the possibility, the Not-yet of that idea, lies hidden in the earliest sensuous perceptions, and that as reason is evolved from what is finite, so faith is evolved from what from the very beginning is infinite in the perceptions of our senses. _Hibbert Lectures._ Each religion has its own peculiar growth, but the seed from which they spring is everywhere the same. That seed is the perception of the infinite, from which no one can escape who does not wilfully shut his eyes. From the first flutter of human consciousness, that perception underlies all the other perceptions of our senses, all our imaginings, all our concepts, and every argument of our reason. It may be buried for a time beneath the fragments of our finite knowledge, but it is always there, and, if we dig deep enough, we shall always find that buried seed, supplying the living sap to the fibres and feeders of all true faith. _Hibbert Lectures._