"You're right, Tom," he said, "in your view of taste. Taste is sublimated morality. It is the appreciation of the proportion and fitness of all things in the universe, and of course it is above simple morality, for that is founded upon a partial view. Taste is the universal, where a system of morals is the local."
"Can't you say that of art?" asked Rangely. "I should think art is the universal, where religion is the provincial. A religion expresses the needs and the aspirations of a race or a country, while art embodies the aspirations and attributes of humanity."
"Good!" Bently responded. "That is better than I should have said it, but it's my belief, all the same. There are so few people who have imagination enough even to understand what one means by saying that art is the only thing in the world worth living for. Why, art is the supreme expression of humanity; the apotheosis of all the best there is in the race."
"I don't see that," objected another. "Isn't religion the expression of the longings of the soul, or whatever there is in us we call soul? I can't say it well, but it seems to me you talk of religions, not religion."
"People seldom take the trouble to make that distinction. He who attacks any of the religions is generally set down as striking at religion itself."
"Religion," returned Bently, "is the expression of fear, and nothing else, if you sift it to the bottom. Knowledge kills so-called religion as surely as it does those lower forms of belief which it is nowadays the fashion to dub superstition. It is precisely the same feeling that builds churches and that rhymes the country hag's charms. Fairies and saints are double and twisted cousins, after all."
"But religion," persisted the German, "is more than the expression of fear; it is the embodiment of the aspirations of mankind; of the instinct and desire for worship."
"For worshipping something," amended Tom. "That is the same thing differently phrased."
"No, it isn't, either. To yearn for the higher is not to show that we fear it, but that we long to grow like it. It is a confession of incompleteness, of weakness, I grant you; but a thousand times no to your calling it fear."
"I confess to having been hasty, and modify my words so far as to say; an expression of fear or weakness."