COMPARITIVE RELIGION

It is more than two centuries since the West took interest in Eastern religions and philosophies that have grown out of the sum of beliefs and experiences. The interest in these had led to understanding the scriptures of the different peoples and developed the vast amount of linguistic studies and translations into European languages. In fact the missionary efforts to carry the Gospel to the heathen had led to a profound after-effect namely an inner understanding of the souls of the peoples who also in diverse ways formulated according to the limits of their rationality the concep­tions which have begun to be known as specially religious, the idea of God, the idea of the soul, the problem of death and exis­tence after death, and the conception of fate and faith, and the idea of the goal of life and man. These conceptions have been found in the apparently primitive peoples even, and if we could understand the methods by which they had begun to relatethemselves with the Godhead or the several godly powers (beneficent as well as maleficent) then we have a very illuminating record of the evolution of religion itself. We may then be able to discern the patterns of religious behaviour available in humanity.  Studies apparently called anthropological had yielded results of a gratifying nature. It has led to the study of evolution of religion almost on the lines of biologi­cal evolutionary theories, which tries to understand the present in terms of the past, on the belief that there is a process of evolution of reason from the instinctive beginnings The broad distinction between the higher religions and the primitive religions seems to be today the distinction between instinctive mythological and the rational intellectual (abstract). Though this is a broad enough distinction yet the fact remains that there is much in rational and supra-rational religions that is mythologically slanted.

The fact that the most primitive religious dogma contains in germ the most mystical truths of spiritual being reveals the truth which comparitive religious studies will have to accept that in reality the microcosm contains the macrocosm, that the last degradation of matter contains the structure of spiritual being itself in one word everything is contained in everything only in different degrees of obversion, conversion, inversion and perversion. The paradoxes of religion just as the antinomies of philosophy arise out this realisation.

The intrinsic truths of religion owe their origin to a state or consciousness of awareness which is supralogical, firstly because they are so very self-evident to our consciousness and ex­plain the principles of life and conduct and secondly because they are implied as axioms of reason or logic itself. This supra logical knowledge is not got through reasoning from facts of our sense or idea but almost inmediatedly in a state of trance or intoxication or dhyana or meditation. The first two are usually induced by practice, the last is something that is attained in absorption with what is known as the Ultimate Reality or God. The extraordinary thing about these revelations is that they are protected by the followers of such cults with a fanatic sincerity that borders on intolerance of all criticism or even testing or verification. But the attitude of the fanatic is born out of fear of failure of verification and us such many have attempted to stifle the individuals by denying any possibility of verification or anubhava of the transcendent truths. To some it amounts to heterodoxy to seek verification or experience or revelation. However persons who have sought to go to the Ultimate Reality had to hazard this exposure to criticism and punishment.  Thus opened a route to the Spiritual or Mystic being out side the pale of religions and its methods. They had to discover methods and ways of the higher spiritual or occult and mystical on their own initiative, for in a way the religions have either obli­terated the routes or forgotten them. Therefore for a proper under­standing of the foundations of religion and its institutions or dogmas, one has to go backwards to the sources of spiritual experi­ence not merely contained in the scriptures of the religions but in the heart of man. Higher Religions have indeed been able to lift the lid or open the route ever by slight suggestions when in one voice they assert that the Divine is to be found in the heart, through meditation and surrender. Not outside oneself but within oneself is to be found the secret of our unity with the Reality, the secret of immortality and bliss, and the vision that liberates man from fear of the world and its paradoxes, impermanences, and sorrows. This is the meaning of the famous utterance or command (vidhi): Know Thyself or know thy Self.

This mystic imperience is crucial to the inner evolution of man. There fore is it called adhyatma sastra - the science or yoga of inner being or living, living not only in one’s impermanent body subject to the ravages of age and death, but also of that which is usually called the
‘I’ - the subject of the experiences of the body physical, vital and mental.

The second major axiom of the mystic experience is the vision of all things both living and non-living as being suffused by the Spirit or what has been felt as the self of oneself. All this is the body of God, is God, and they live and move and have their being in Him. This is in respect of the so-called objective universe. One also experiences mystically that there is only one God and that is God. Ekam sat. Sarvam khalvidam Brahma. One leaves behind the concept of Atma and enters into the awareness of the Brahman and discovers that indeed they are one and the same - the avama and the parama so to speak. This is also the basic mystic formula of the Tattvam asi. All these seem to be so self-evident to that mystic awareness known anandaas (bliss) awareness that goes beyond the cognitivity of the jnana or vijnana. In fact one is urged forwards to the apprehension of that which is the ground of all these experience-imperience complex into what Boehme calls the Urground - the Ultimate, the Para the transcendent, the indescribable infinity (anantyam ).

Mystical imperience-experience embraces both the poles of Being and transcendence, the subject and object and explores the Infinity that is a continuous yet permanent Reality.

This is the region of spirituality, pure and unadulterated which is beyond the realms of religious experience. In fact as Sri Ramchandraji used to put it where the religion ends there spi­rituality begins. It is however from this central spiritaality which has been designated as the Zero - later expressed at lesser levels as Sunya, as a concept of abhava or negation, that all reli­gion draws its sustenance and quasi-reality. But we have been more concerned with the experiences of God in his oneness and many-ness or rather we have been concerned with the God in his meaningfulness to man. God a proved, approved , and worshipped in terms of certain attributes which have needed the existence of God as such. A god who is unconnected with the world even in respect of its creation or sustention or destruction and redemption is held to be an impersonal - a nonbeing as it were. It is not necessary to hold that God is such except in respect of certain aspects of Nature and man and his freedom - a mere spectator - impassive observer. Such an experience of God may well be useless even as Scientists have held-for an incessant interference with the laws of Nature would make the discoveries of science Impossible - uniformity would not be available prediction would be impossible and chance would reign. As against the Fate (determinism) of science, the world of chance has no hope of being acceptable to man Han wants a world of order, determinism and his God must be one who upholds order and not introduce chaos chance. Though inwardly scientists would much wish for miracles to be performed for their own personal affairs, yet for the outward semblance of work for others they would insist upon the miracles being as natural as any other natural event though the law under which they happen may be undiscovered. In any case we have been shown that God is precisely described in terms of man’s needs for Order, moral and temporal in every sphere of man’s personal, and social behaviour. The mystical view of reality is explained clearly when it is held to be the standpoint of the absolute, whereas the religious is the stand point of the relational. The relational may be also relativistic, but need not be so when the mystical informs the relational and corrects it by means of a equation that might be called ‘conversion’ - a logical tern so to speak.

Comparitive mysticism has in recent times been a profitable enquiry in so far as it has clearly demonstrated that there can be ‘imperience’ - experience of Reality in its absolute and transcendent status, miss called impersonal, though it is beyond the impersonal of the universals of logic and the personal of the sociologist and the individualists. There can always be a personal knowledge of the im­personal nature, and similarly there can be a personal knowledge of the Transcendent. Perhaps if religious experience can be called the personal knowledge of the Godhead, philosophy can be called the impersonal knowledge of the same reality known as God. But we may hazard the guess that philosophy may also attempt the impersonal knowledge of the transcendent. This latter seems to be the only reason for some considering that philosophy is superior to religious knowledge even as Hegel does. However it is the experience of Sri Ramchandraji that where philosophy ends religious experience begins and where religious experience ends mystical or spiritual imperience- experience begins.

A true study of comparitive religion then should firstly be grounded in the spiritual experience-imperience of all religious knowledge.

Many years ago when the movement for the discarding of religious experience and God gained strength thanks to the dialectical materialism having won its first victories in the area of politics, there was a counter-movement which tried to show that there are many levels of religion, and therefore many types of Gods, who are either equal or arranged hierarchically, according to the fields of operation and function in the world over which they apparently presided. Thus naturalistic religion revelled in having all Gods preside over the several kinds of phenomena of nature. The inner life of man revealed problems of conscience, society, moral  law and duty, over which certain other Gods used to preside and direct, still higher were the gods that presided over the life beyond and the worlds beyond Broadly speaking these levels imposed a system of divine, human and terrestrial natural order, which operated almost like the laws of Nature. However it was clear that a unity of all these was demanded and the acceptance of the Ultimate Godhead was forced on the people, at least thinking minds. Thus arose a theolo­gy . We may call it the natural theology, a common sense construction or speculation of the way of Nature . It was found that one had to have a philosophy of the world, physical, psychological and divine, a mythology that created a hierarchy of the many gods, belonging to the physical, psychological, and divine levels or orders. The mytholo­gy necessitated concepts of precedence on account of the powers and also gave rise to the varied myths and mythologies and legends. In fact it became clear that not only these powers were made rival to each other, they confronted another phenomena arising from the bosom of the Absolute -the Spiritual, the contra-gods, or God-opposites , even like Non-being . If gods were of the day these contra-gods were sovereigns of the night, and thus two sets of Gods arose. A new my­thology was also formulated . But then the crisis arose between these two sets - and were have witnessed the famous opposition between the forces of light (daytime) and the forces of the night ( ratri), the former were known as devas the latter were known as asuras. By a strange inversion of conversion, the names asura and deva were interchanged in the religion of Zoroaster. Asuras were said to be divine whereas the devas were shown to be deluders:almost recalling Blanco White’s sonnet : if light can thus hide why not life?

The strange spectacles which are being presented to us today is that conflict between the forces of darkness and of light, of what has become in the sphere of dharma or morals of justice and good and injustice and evil. Religious ethics is the relativistic ethics essaying to define the areas of dharma and adharma that have resulted in making religion a solution to our problems of dharma (good ) and adharma(evil). Contrary conventions have been promulgted and it is one of the greatest feats of modern conventionalism to have evolved common law which really reveals the universal consensus about what are the basic or cardinal virtues which religion should promote Undoubtedly this has entailed the whole traditions, conventions, customs, and usuages and we have discovered that any true religious man cannot but be loyal to the principlex of truth, tolerance and chastity or loyalty to the highest ideal towards which religion is a means. However we know that it has taken quite a lot of self-criticism that had led religions to realise this absolute of virtue which alone can be the means to spirituality or liberation. These virtues are accepted as necessary and desirable at least as between the followers of certain religions but not in respect of others or other religions, which has by that token led to watering dowm of these values or virtues even in respect of the members of that religion itself. Sectarianisms have made loyalty to the Ultimate impossible for men have been counselled to be loyalty to the institution/and sects than to truth or the Godhead. Once an institution or person is identified with the Ultimate then it follows that virtue is sacrificed. As it was said the first casualty in War is truth so too the first casualty in institutional religion is truth. Since truth is a difficult thing to practice and much more to define Philosophy has become a hand maid of casuistry rather than an instrument of reality.

It has been made clear that we are revealed the Nature of God in the several religions. There are atleast five levels of the presentation of the God-Idea: the transcendent absolute , the creator-complex of the Deity, which may be functionally divided into three or four or any number called graphically as Visve devas. The third is important realisation of the Avatar or descent into the evolutionary or historical scheme of humanity for the purposes of teaching the knowledge in all its manyness (kalas), fostering the virtuous and annihilating the non-virtuous (not to be identified with the powers of light and night), and the realisation of the descent and entry of God into the heart or every seeker after the Ultimate thus becoming his very life and being and reality, and lastly as present in Nature in all its manyness of phenomena and also in icons or symbolic objects in gross nature. These five forms of God have been variously worshipped - sometimes one at a time, sometimes simultaneously; the higher type of religions emphasise the super humanity of God and adore the Ultimate Transcendent of whom the others are but inversions or reflections or illusions. Some others adore only the inner ruler aspect of God, as the self of oneself. Some are lost in the admiration and greatness of the historical des­cent, and hold on to His worship. Unfortunately there are many such descents in history and prehistory and there are claims to such a status even today, that it has bred more conflicts than understanding. Comparitive studies in religion have somewhat smoothened or rubbed off the angularities of opinions about hero worships and we are hoping for a better mutual understanding of the greatness of avatars, eastern and western. Sometimes the avatars pass of as prophets and thus has posed problems of conflict between sectarians within each religion. Obviously static dogmas cannot fit into the evolutionary scheme of spiritual development and attainment. Religions as dogmatic set of beliefs and institutions which have ceased to function dynamically create more problems than solve them, and instead of liberation into the higher levels of spirituality, such as the experience-imperience of the Transcendent which is the root of all reality, they have forged bondages however silken sometimes. The beauty of the rituals, the dextrous quality of the methods of worship, the cultivated air of serenity and sombreness, and the rich and lavish expenditure made for the promotion of art and architecture, have been so many hindrances to the real imperience of the profound love at the heart of spirituality. Beauty and art have their roots in the need for recreation and expression and obviously are based on experience but they hardly reveal the inner poise and basis of reality as such. We may agree with Rabindranath that the world of the absolute has hardly the charm of the expression and nature itself may be said to exhibit this outer beauty of the form and colour that senses react to and motor organs recreate and amuse the ego of man. Lila of creation may be, the play of externality and manyness, and may be the divine evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo also looks upon this expression of the potentialities of the Absolute as the goal and perfection of expression in terms of the divine man in the making. However beauty is but a word for expressional satisfaction, recreative apprehension and formal dedication . However it is also that  impoverishes the intelligence from its dynamic infinity. If by some spiritual al­chemy the experience-imperience of Reality could be made flow into bath the expression of beauty and the intensity of internal potential­ity that is infinite, and if indeed the infinite is not finitised in the process then it may be possible to apprehend a religious architecture and art that reveals rather than veils the Spiritual. This is yet a far cry. All our beauty or its creation dependon the lines or boundaries that we draw from imagination even as Blake has said.

It may appear that this analysis of beauty entails its being devalued and also that it is not an absolute value at all. Religion in a sense entails a relativistic conception and beauty involved in religion is equally a relativistic concept of  value.

There is a way by which religion could be made to function as a way towards the spiritual, instead of what it has been made into as a means to convert the spiritual into the worship of mere expre­ssion or art. Religions have attempted to play a dual role and thus has led to the confusion that prevails about the goals of religions. If religion means literally the re-connecting of the individual with the Divine Reality or God, then its means should be more and more psychological and inner act of connecting with the same . The other process by which one seeks to connect oneself with God through out­ward Nature is plausible but essentially philosophical or scientific. The outer Nature is claimed to be the body of God in externality and objectivity, whereas the realisation of oneself as the body of God is the realisation in subjectivity and interiority. When the glory of Nature is contemplated and the existence of God is intuited we have the birth of Naturalistic pantheism or the creationism of God, or the vastness of divine omnipotence . God is not only a great Artist, but also the great geometrician and scientist. But when the  same God is intuited as one’s own inner self, as one who makes one live and move and act from within and also reveals the supreme glory within out of the reach of Nature itself , which Nature would like to parti­cipate in by becoming one’s own body as it were, the transcen­dence of God is imperienced. Religion would faign keep both the poises of God as the Brahman - the creator etc  and as self (atman) (antaryaamin) - the spiritual life and self. But this is pre­cisely a most difficult thing.

The idea of God as omnipotent power is so universal an idea that it may well be said that it has led to the sequential idea of fear of disobedience . So many religions finally fall back on the idea of fear of disobedience, that it is well-known that fear is central to the experience of God rather than beauty. Beauty itself has become a symbol of fear - for we are all afraid of being tempted by beauty which might land us in disobedience. However if God is love, then fear could be overcome but then fear and love or love and disobedience seem to be polar unities, the excuse or pardon of disobedience is defined as love and fear is cast aside be­cause one is sure that one’s disobedience will be unnecessary as God is love. The idea of God as love is a man’s complex belief that there is always ready the pardon from God- though the provison is that one must seek God or surrender to Him or in some way pitiate Him. All these are available in the several religions in some man­ner or other.

The omnipresence of God is an experience which is cultivted by means of fear itself as even in the ordinary political state the omnipresence of the police is a deterrent to crime. However much it is clear to us that such an experience of omnipresent fear is not very much capable of giving us that peace which comes from the mystic experience of liberation from fear through the omnipresene of the Divine Reality, when the mind is transcended and one is at home with one’s deepest self .

Religions of love tend to emphasize the relational nature of God, as father or as mother and develop the idea of fraternity of all creatures or created things and beings. Love seems to be diversi­fied into any number relational phases, including those of the lover and the beloved - which despite the introversion are really manifesta­tions of the extravertedness. These anthropological attitudes have limited relevance for social unity but not for liberty and equality seems to be precarious. Modern religious thought has began to emphasize the role of equality and liberty in social and religious existence - but it appears that religious belief has hardly that force or logic to promote this realisation.

If then we consider that religion is a means to the realisation of the truth about ourselves and our relationship to the Transcendent Primal cause of a11 creation and ourselves, then it appears that it has ceased to be the real driving force towards enabling man to­wards  liberation.

Nor would the idea of God as the just help to make God an instrument or means of liberation. In other words religion and God of religion hardly help man to attain the liberation from the basic ignorance of the Ultimate Reality nor do they help to connect man with it.

The truth seems to be that religions are at best social insti­tuitions, of a special kind or unique kind, that help to maintain the principles of social control, by emphasizing the principles of fraternity, equality and liberty from oppressive forces that tend to disrupt the unity and harmony of the society. Thus the concept of religion as Mata is a set of beliefs which render the social life pos­sible is Buddism which seeks to get beyond the social ties towards liberation beyond the social, is mystical in movement, though the social motivation began to dominate the lower levels of aspiration. In other words Buddhism has two phases - the spiritual and the religious- the former emphasized moksa or nirvana, the latter emphasized social humanitarianism or dhamma. Similarly Jainism reveals two phases - the spiritual that makes for jinas or liberated and liberators, and the other for laymen emphasizing the virtues or silas of anuvata, the
little-dharmas necessary for providing the preparatory ground for the mahavrata or fitness for arhathood or jinahood.

Dharma became a more dominant religious trend than moksa, all the while reiterating that Darma is the means to moksa, even when the downward trend away from moksa is discernable. In fact the tendency to make religion suitable to the fulfilment of aspirations of man in respect of physical, biological and mental wants as well as social solidarity has been the dominant trend in all religions after the first few centuries of liberation-consciousness. So consistent and uniform has been this tendency more to bring down the kingdom of happiness or God on this earth than to make man rise towards the higher regions of the cosmic or supra-cosmic or transcendent.

The works today speak about the social value of religion rather than the spiritual valued of religion. Religion has become a byeword for stagmation and apathy towards transcenendental  realities. It has ceased to be means and has become a knot of ignorance. Revolt against religion has set from the inner sources and origins of religious instinct or motive, and has shown that there are higher and more simple and subtler means to Realisation of oneself than the institu­tions and concepts of religion. Religious history has lost its mean­ing, the symbols have become dumb and unlinking with reality, and the rites and rituals habits of performance. As Francis Bacon has said we have developed a series of fourfold idols, the idols of the tribe, the idols of the market-place, the idols of the Cave and above all the idols of the theatre. Other idols or icons may have only lesser danger as against these fourfold opaque statues which as F. Nietzsche warned might well crush us to death.

Gloomy and pessimistic though this downward movement of religious life has been, let us ask ourselves whether the recipe precribed by Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason would help. Would philosophy as Scientific endeavour help us to rediscover the fonts of spirituality if it could?

If philosophy is assumed to be an intellectual attempt to explain the assumptions of religion, that endevour known as apologetics has been the main function of all theological philosophies. It was precisely this that characterised medieval theology and philosophy. Many intellectual systems have been developed only on this apologetical manner , known to India as Mimamsa. Medieval theological philophies have revealed that philosophies at that time dared not to question the dogmas of religion, nor could they dare to verify them. In fact spiritual experiences had to bow down before the dogma  and were sqeezed into the pattens of religion. This situation was in-tolerable and we have one reason why so many religions started to for­mulate differentiating dogmas on the basis of spiritual insights that could ill fit into the earlier parent religion. Sectarian movements within a religion tended to breakaway and form independent religions The diversity of religions is not to be referred to diverse ways of approach to the same reality, known as One, but also due to the unique unfolding of the quality of divinity that opens up a new approa­ch. Such a quality could obviously be open to the individual prophet or seer a new dimension of the divinity known or unknown to the reli­gions of that day. Philosophical theology could hardly go beyond and had to accept that there are more ways of knowing reality than through the methods of religion or the methods of reason. In modern times, and perhaps at all times for a minority of intellectuals, philosophy meant an intellectual or rational attempt to explain and interpret our experiences . It is said to be even an obstinate attempt to arrive at the nature of Reality not in terms of God or theology but in terms of the highest concepts available to human reason. The development of intellectual logic, both deductive and inductive, was rendered possible by this eschewing of God as theological Ultimate and making the Ul­timate the Absolute Ground of Reason or the Absolute Idea. Philosophy liberated human reason from its shackles to religious dogmas, and instead of being its handmaid became its critic. Though philosophy as such can be said to be atheistical in so far as it does not accept revelational ‘truths’, and it had never ceased to consider them as irrational, yet it had striven to see the iota of rationality that might be present in it. Therefore a study of philosophical grounds of religious beliefs, not to speak of spiritual awareness, had been an unconvincing one, though the subject has been handled by scores of first rate intellectual minds. However the way of philosophy should become more liberal and not remain strictly confined to the dialectical kind of reason if it has to play a real role in unfolding the hid­den potentialities of a way of knowing that is trans-rational or dia­lectical. By dialectical I mean the rationality based on the principle of non-self-contradiction and law of contradiction or negation based on the alternatives. (tarka). Though philosophy has been understood to mean love of Ultimate Reality ( sophia) , yet it has in methodology meant the love of intellectual dialectic and current­ly it means love of words (logos)  as species of philology  (linguistics).  Language of philosophy is to be distinguished from the language of the commonfolk (loka) and the language of religion is obviously different so much so it has been held that the mystical imperiences are inexpressi­ble or incommunicable through languages of the other orders of experience. Philosophy thus broke away from the mystical at the first phase. Despite the universality of reason, that  truth is the same for all under the same conditions, it has been shown that religions have particularised truths limited them in many ways.

Modern philosophy reveals the break way nature of all thinking from its roots. The problems could have been faced differently. Can the mystical imperiences of the transcendent Reality be interpreted by evolving a logic suitable to communication in terms of philosophy, thus bye-passing religious dogmas ? This indeed has been attempted.Mystical philosophy attempts to eschew mythology and imagination on the one hand and also the rigid patterns of the logic of contradiction known to rationalism. It begins to realise that psychological logic could bridge the rigid lines that have fettered the discernment of a twofold truth. Truth being the aim of philosophy, its criteria of truth are such as try to define falsehood in logical terms, which includes error. Theories of error and falsehood have abounded in logic of this kind. The mystical logic, being of the infinite consciousness transcending so to speak the distinctions of truth and falsehood of the rationalistic mind, discovers that in reality the opposites co-exist and are not as Hegel shrewedly observed ,linked up inextricably with each in order to explain the process of change and evolution by reali­sing a synthesis of opposites, In fact the equal reality of the opposites showed on the one hand that all experience is of the order of finiteness or logical particularness, and on the other that it is because of this equality of the propositions of finite nature, one finds it difficult to evolve a logic of the Transcendent in terms of the finite. Despite the assertions of the logicians that there are universal propositions, all that experience reveals is that all propositions are particular, so that one may be able to assert the equal reality of all particular contradictory propositions.

This realisation in Jaina logic has revealed the basic need to cultivate not only tolerances in religious diversity but also philosophic diversity. At any rate it has become increasing clear that truth is not the ultimate of Reality, and that all truth is what belongs to the realms of appearance and relatively true . This should of course be distinguished from the degress of reality of Absolutism which really tries to condemn one set of truths to appearance or falsity whilst exalting any other set to the status of reality. We have seen that since reason cannot comprehend the Universal transcendent, its being an ultimate value also is questionable. Studies in comparitive philosophies could hardly render greater service than arriving at this unsatisfactory conclusion.

Empiricistic explanations do not go far even to prove the validity of religious beliefs. God and soul and even morality or order cannot be proved by means of experiences, whether of the order of sense or inference or analogy . They happen to be presuppositions for the explanations of human behaviour and conduct. May be there is another means by which they could be grasped, known, seen and entered into as a great seer stated,. This may be the way of revelation , an unfolding of divine truths or realities by the Divine Himself . May be there is a way or means or method by which this supreme revelational possibility could be secured. But so many of the theologians have denied  this second possibility and have asserted that the traditional scriptures have been given by God and no one should either seek to verify it or deny it, or even try to attain to the status, of the Rishi or Seer or prophet . Comparitive studies in religion have revealed that this prohibition or this inhibition is unwarranted interference with the innermost divine instinct in man. Man has again and again revolted against this interdiction with the dogma of unique revelational possibility. It is this that had kept on the religious and mystical forces at war with one another in most religions which reveal internal fiss­ions and instability. It is only when the mystical hope for  direct experience or imperience, and revelational vision and veriflability is  burning in the human heart and religions permit themselves to be constantly leavened with it that there can be any real universal Religion, which seems to be the hope of many scholars devoted to the study of comparitive religion. Freedom and authority should mingle sufficiently to produce a healthy upward movement in man’s divine evolution.