It is not only important that we should appeal to our own experience in trying to discover what is true in religion, but we should also take into consideration the experiences of others. If a man, who is partially color blind, should base a science of color on his own experience, it would necessarily be partial or incomplete. So if a class of men, with certain peculiar traits, should build up a system of theology on their religious experiences, it would necessarily be partial and not adequate for universal application. Suppose, for example, that a number of persons with large reasoning powers, cold temperaments, and very little religious feeling, should build up a religious system on their experiences. Is it not perfectly clear that it would be partial and narrow? It would make no allowance at all for people of strong religious experiences. While it might be of some use to these few people, it would never help the great bulk of humanity who need the help of religion the most. To say that a religion is not for the common people is to admit that it is narrow and not true to universal human nature. Certainly it is not Christian, for the common people heard Jesus gladly; and they ever will hear gladly any one who preaches a religion that is true to their own religious experiences. In trying to discover what is true in religion, we should also carefully examine the religious experiences of all ages, as recorded in their religious writings. I shall here quote from an authority on this point, because I think it of much value, and because it is not probable that the writer was influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. I shall quote from John Stuart Mill's "System of Logic," page 477: "There is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Their meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions of mankind--of the opinion by which the general conduct of their lives is, or as they conceive ought to be, more especially regulated--is aware that even when recognizing verbally the same doctrines, they attach to them at different periods a greater or less quantity, and even a different kind of meaning. The words in their original acceptation connoted, and the propositions expressed, a complication of outward facts and inward feelings, to different portions of which the general mind is more particularly alive in different generations of mankind. To common minds, only that portion of the meaning is in each generation suggested, of which that generation possesses the counterpart in its habitual experience. But the words and propositions lie ready to suggest to any mind duly prepared to receive the remainder of the meaning. Such individual minds are almost always to be found; and the lost meaning, revived by them, again by degrees works its way into the general mind.