The destruction of religion would constitute a serious loss of moral strength and mental hope to mankind. Its dogma of the existence of a higher power, its insistence that a virtuous life is rewarded and a vicious one punished, its periodical call to drop worldly thoughts and activities are values of which the multitudes cannot afford to be prematurely deprived without grave peril to their higher evolution. The philosophical student should be sympathetic to the genuine worth of religion as he should be hostile to the traditional abuses. He must not permit himself to be swept away on the emotional tide of extreme fanaticism, either by the materialistic atheists who would utterly destroy religion and persecute its priesthood in the name of science or by the blind pious dogmatists who would destroy scientific free thought in the name of God.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 6 : Philosophy and Religion > # 120
