He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the
development of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages
in the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of
each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world
would thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human
mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and in
which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and the
thoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of the
individual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the
fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense,
which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a world unlike
one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its connexion
with the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development,
of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race.
In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they were
thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation.
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