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LECTURE IV.
201
I call this variety of acceptation, this misunderstanding, which is inevitable in ancient and also in modern religion, the dialectic growth and decay, or, if you like, the dialectic life of religion, and we shall see again and again, how important it is in enabling us to form a right estimate of religious language and thought. The dialectic shades in the language of religion are almost infinite; they explain the decay, but they also account for the life of religion. You may remember that Jacob Grimm, in one of his poetical moods, explained the origin of High and Low German, of Sanskrit and Prakrit, of Doric and Ionic, by looking upon the high dialects as originally the language of men, upon the low dialects as originally the language of women and children. We can observe, I believe, the same parallel streams in the language of religion. There is a high and there is a low dialect; there is a broad and there is a narrow dialect; there are dialects for men and dialects for children, for clergy and laity, for the noisy streets and for the still and lonely chamber. And as the child on growing up to manhood has to unlearn the language of the nursery, its religion, too, has to be translated from a feminine into a more masculine dialect. This does not take place without a struggle, and it is this constantly recurring struggle, this inextinguishable desire to recover itself, which keeps religion from utter stagnation. From first to last religion is oscillating between these two opposite poles, and it is only if the attraction of one of the two poles becomes too strong, that the healthy movement ceases, and stagnation and decay set in. If religion cannot accommodate itself on the one side to the capacity of
