We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them: 

(1) The normal character of the religious experience.  Faith had been regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed personality.  A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes:  “You may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease to treat believers with contempt.”  William James has given us a great quantity of Varieties of Religious Experience, and he deals with all of them respectfully.

(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience.  Man “wills to live,” and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any he can find in his world.  He “wills to believe,” and discovers an answer to his faith in the Unseen.  This is a reaffirmation of the definition, “faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test of things not seen.”  And the student of religious psychology has now vastly more material on which to work, because the last century opened up still another quarry for investigation in Comparative Religion.  An Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less developed.  Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief.  It is not possible to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is light, and within the rest all is darkness.  Everything that grows out of man’s experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or practice that has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human being is without significance.  Our own faith is often clarified by comparing it with that of some supposedly unrelated religion.  Many a usage and conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to something in our Bible.  The development of theology or of ritual in some other religion throws light on similar developments in Christianity.  The widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our assurance of the reality of God.  “To the philosopher,” wrote Max Mueller, “the existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought.”  Under varied names, and with very differing success in their relations with the Unseen, men have had fellowship with the one living God.  It was this unity of religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving to express when they wrote, “Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name variously Him who is but One.”

This study of comparative religion has gained for us: 

(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity, and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.