India, China, and Japan, returning in due time by way of the
United States. In this and in later visits to the Near East
and India ( 1925, 1927-8) he not only deepened an already
profound study of the great religions of the East but was able
to realize at first hand what in the religious experience which
they enshrine is specific and unique and what on the other
hand is common to all genuine religions, however diversely
expressed in sacred writings, ritual, or art. He brought to the
interpretation of the religious practices and beliefs of many
lands an imaginative sympathy that was receptive without
ceasing to be critical. One of the special interests in the last
ten years of his life was the establishment at Marburg of a
museum for the comparative study of religions, not as dead
curiosities but as living faiths.

From the time of this first Eastern journey Christianity
must have stood for Otto against a background not so much
of west-European science as of the great world-religions of
which he held it to be the culmination. In 1917 he was ap-
pointed to a Chair of Theology at Marburg-on-the-Lahn,
quaintest and most fascinating of German university towns,
and there he resided till his death. He had never married,
but lived with a widowed sister and her daughter, and the
household was a charmingly devoted one. And it was in this
year 1917 that Das Heilige appeared. It is no doubt Otto's
most central and important work. Those that followed it
were all within the framework of its ideas, some of them
being amplifications working out more fully points of the
argument, others manifesting further the interest in Indian
and other religions which is so unmistakable in the pre-
sent work. Certainly Das Heilige appeared at an opportune
moment, and its success was immediate. It ran rapidly
through a number of editions and was translated into many
languages, including Japanese. What Otto had to say did
appear, in the phrase of George Fox, to 'speak to the condi-
tion' of many thoughtful people in that decade of disillusion
that followed the First World War. It is noteworthy that he
was one of the first German scholars to be invited after the
war to lecture in the United States. Widely read as his books
were, however, he never attempted to found a 'school', partly

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