Mueller's Reasons for a Constant Critique of Personal Religious Faith

So it's my first semester of graduate school at Western Michigan University (I ended up getting a BA in my first graduate school course, Empiricisms, and pretty much A-ced the undergrad course, deductive logic, that i was auditing to fulfill the symbolic logic (but really predicate logic) requirement for the master's degree in philosophy I will hopefully be getting in two years :) and I'm taking a course called Classics in Comparative Religion. We are reading 'The Essential Max Mueller: On Language, Mythology, and Religion' and I really like some of the things he talked about in his Preface to Chips From a German Worshop, so I thought I would repeat them here, while I'm watching #1 OSU beat #2 Texas 17-7 with 10 minutes left to go in the 4th quarter, but first, you must understand that Mueller was a Christian and this is given from the perspectifve of him trying to defend his own Christian faith from the field of comparative religion, which he practically invented, so in a way, it's his own faith and reason at war with each other, check out what I mean

'Nothing is more difficult to seize than the salient features, the traits that constitute the permanent expression and real character of a religion...

We speak glibly of Buddhism and Brahmanism, forgetting that we are generalizing on the most intimate convictions of millions and millions of human souls, divided by half the world and by thousands of years...

The Fathers of the Church…admitted freely that a comparison of Christianity and other religions was useful. ‘If there is any agreement,’ Basilius remarked, ‘between their (the Greeks) doctrines and our own, it may benefit us to know them; if not, then to compare them and learn how they differ, will help not a little towards confirming that which is the better of the two. But this is not the only advantage of a comparative study of religions. The Science of Religion will for the first time assign to Christianity its right place among the religions of the world; it will show for the firm time fully what was meant by the fullness of time; it will restore to the whole history of the world, in its unconscious progress towards Christianity, its true and sacred character…

[Note from me: this next passage is crucial to understanding Nietzsche’s view on religion] We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge for it the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he instructs his own life, and the lives of those who are most dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, not claim any immunities for Christianity…

And while watching their [religions] appearance in different countries, and their treatment under varying circumstances, we shall be able, I believe, to profit ourselves, both by the errors which others committed before us, and by the truth which they discovered. We shall know the rocks that threaten every religion in this changing and shifting world of ours, and having watched many a storm of religious controversy and many a shipwreck in distant seas, we shall face with greater calmness and prudence the troubled waters at home…

If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism that no religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its founder and its first apostles. Yet it is but seldom borne in mind that without constant reformation, i.e., without a constant return to its fountain-head, every religion, even the most perfect, nay the most perfect on account of its very perfection, more even than others, suffers from its contact with the world…

Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases….What they (the founders of the worlds religions) desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offer often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples. As soon as a religion is established, and more particularly when it has become the religion of a powerful state, the foreign and worldly elements encroach more and more on the original foundation, and human interests mar the simplicity and purity of the plan which the founder had conceived in his own heart, and matured in the his communings with his God…

Never shall I forget the deep despondency of a Hindu convert, a real martyr to his faith, who had pictured to himself from the pages of the New Testament what a Christian country must be, and who when he came to Europe found everything different from what he had imagined in his lonely meditations…It was the Bible only that saved him from returning to his old religion, and helped him to discern beneath theological futilities, accumulated during nearly two thousand years, beneath pharisaical hypocrisy, infidelity, and want of charity, the buried, but still living seed, committed to the earth by Christ and his Apostles…

But to the true believer [the believer in Truth], truth, wherever it appears, is welcome, nor will any doctrine seem the less true or the less precious, because it was seen, not only by Moses or Christ, but likewise by Buddha or Lao-tse…

But in the history of the world, our religion, like our own language, is but one out of many; and in order to understand fully the position of Christianity in the history of the world, and its true place among the religions of mankind, we must compare it, not with Judaism only, but with the religious aspirations of the whole world, with all, in fact, that Christianity came either to destroy or to fulfill…

Justin Martyr, in his Apology (A.D. 139), has this memorable passage: ‘One article of faith then is, that Christ is the first begotten of God, and we have already proved Him to be the very Logos (or universal Reason), of which mankind are all partakers; and therefore those who live according to the Logos are Christians, notwithstanding they may pass with you for Atheists; such among the Greeks were Sokrates and Herakleitos and the like…they who have made or make the Logos or Reason the rule of their actions are Christians, and men without fear and trembling…

Clement said ‘Philosophy, therefore, prepares and opens the way to those who are made perfect by Christ’…And again: ‘It is clear that the same God to whom we owe the Old and New Testaments, gave also to the Greeks their Greek philosophy, by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks’…

[and finally,]

Every religion, even the most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred to us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the [Truth, or] true, though unknown God.’

Great Stuff in my opinion!