THE careful research of many a generation of scholars,
the travel reports, not only of adventurers, missionaries
and explorers, but of many a person you and I count
among our personal acquaintances, have brought home to well-
nigh all of us a realization of the variety of religious ideas and
practices that exist in the world. The result of this realization
has been bewilderment and confusion in many hearts and
minds. Roughly three different types of reaction to the situation
can be discerned: (i) scepticism, that is, the refusal to see in
all these religious ideas and usages more than the expression of
ignorance and folly, in other words a cultural and/or religious
'lag'; (ii) relativism, that is, a disposition to dispense with the
problem of truth in favour of a non-committal registration of all
there is and has been, an attitude which has found much favour
in the latter-day circles of scholars and intellectuals; and finally
(iii) the desire to investigate the variety of what goes under the
names of religion and religions in order to determine by com-
parison and phenomenological analysis if anything like a
structure can be discovered in all these forms of expression, to
what kind of experiences this variegated expression can be
traced, and finally, what kind of reality or realities may
correspond to the experiences in question. It is the last of the
three types of reaction to the predicament characterized above
which seems to us the only promising and fruitful one, and we
propose to follow it in what we have to say here.

The first difficulty we encounter in trying to bring some order
into the bewildering mass of material that geography, anthro-
pology, sociology, archaeology, philology, history, and the history
of religions have placed at our disposal, is the need for criteria

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