worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the Thugs.
The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have
the misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts
commonly counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted
bad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
it in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate all
their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.
This will often happen to us in connection with human religions.
Take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy
of the nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy
of Auguste Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is
expressed in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they do
a great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style;
their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong."
To me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to be
the truth. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Army
are excellent, but I am quite sure their methods are admirable.
Their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions;
they are popular like all religion, military like all religion,
public and sensational like all religion. They are not reverent any more
than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicate
meaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels.
That beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides, in Renan,
in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it--