The
mere endeavor to see and learn the truth for our own personal
satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it prevail, a preparing
the way for this, which always serves this, and is wrongly, therefore,
stamped with blame absolutely in itself and not only in its caricature
and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped with blame, and
disparaged with the dubious title of curiosity, because in comparison
with this wider endeavor of such great and plain utility it looks
selfish, petty, and unprofitable.
And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which
the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,--religion,
that voice of the deepest human experience,--does not only enjoin and
sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting
ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail; but
also, in determining generally in what human perfection consists,
religion comes to a conclusion identical with that which culture,--
culture seeking the determination of this question through _all_ the
voices of human experience which have been heard upon it, of art,
science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, in order
to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution,--likewise
reaches.
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