Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God.  Of faith in God is born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or piety towards God—­for as Cicero said,[47] est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos—­charity towards men.  In God is resumed not only Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God shall at last be all in all.  St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.

And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him, is what we call religion.

What is religion?  In what does it differ from the religious sense and how are the two related?  Every man’s definition of religion is based upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way or another experiencing it.  Tacitus said (Hist. v. 4), speaking of the Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:  profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quae nobis incesta.  Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, gens superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa, while as regards Christianity, with which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, existialis superstitio, inspired by a hatred of mankind, odium generis humani (Ab excessu Aug., xv., 44).  And there have been many others who have shared his opinion.  But where does religion end and superstition begin, or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge into religion?  What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate between them?

It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling of its definer, which have been given of religion.  Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described.  But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power.  Nor is there much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence.  And to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the judicious and perspicacious Cournot:  “Religious manifestations are the necessary consequence of man’s