ABSTRACT
Institutionalised religion, and perhaps also a creed, is essential if any religious practice or doctrine is to be preserved in a relatively unadulterated form, adequately advertised, its adherents given mutual support, its views heard in the right places, and its teaching handed down from one generation to the next. This involves compromise, a hierarchy of power, and careerist churchmen, who perform a necessary function from not necessarily the noblest of motives. But institutionalised religion must inevitably be second best to genuine feeling and belief resulting from one's own experience and thought. Religion requires more than occasional churchgoing and notional assent to a belief, which institutionalised religion tends to perpetuate. Religion is an excellent thing when one's attitude to it is provisional and experimental and when it is informed by that due intellectual humility which must respect the doubts of others and put oneself in their place.
