them which their crude intelligence can entertain only in picture and
parable. Profound explanations and fine distinctions are thrown away
upon them. If you conceive religion in this light, and recollect that
its aims are above all practical, and only in a subordinate degree
theoretical, it will appear to you as something worthy of the highest
respect.

_Philalethes_. A respect which will finally rest upon the principle that
the end sanctifies the means. I don't feel in favor of a compromise on a
basis like that. Religion may be an excellent means of training the
perverse, obtuse and ill-disposed members of the biped race: in the eyes
of the friend of truth every fraud, even though it be a pious one, is to
be condemned. A system of deception, a pack of lies, would be a strange
means of inculcating virtue. The flag to which I have taken the oath is
truth; I shall remain faithful to it everywhere, and whether I succeed
or not, I shall fight for light and truth! If I see religion on the
wrong side--

_Demopheles_. But you won't. Religion isn't a deception: it is true and
the most important of all truths. Because its doctrines are, as I have
said, of such a lofty kind that the multitude can't grasp them without
an intermediary, because, I say, its light would blind the ordinary eye,
it comes forward wrapt in the veil of allegory and teaches, not indeed
what is exactly true in itself, but what is true in respect of the lofty
meaning contained in it; and, understood in this way, religion is the
truth.

_Philalethes_. It would be all right if religion were only at liberty to
be true in a merely allegorical sense. But its contention is that it is
downright true in the proper sense of the word. Herein lies the