I Am grateful to Mr Peter Byrne (‘John Hick's Philosophy of World Religions’, S.J.T., Vol. 35, 289–301) for highlighting some of the central issues for a philosophy of religious pluralism. He starts from the now widespread realisation that it is not a morally or religiously acceptable view that salvation depends upon being a member of the Christian minority within the human race. A more realistic view must be pluralistic, seeing the great religious traditions as different ways of conceiving and experiencing the one ultimate divine Reality, and correspondingly different ways of responding to that Reality. These ways owe their differences to the modes of thinking, perceiving and feeling which have developed within the different patterns of human existence embodied in the various cultures of the earth. Thus, on the one hand the religions are responses to a single ultimate transcendent Reality, whilst on the other hand their several communal consciousnesses of that Reality, formed from different human perspectives, are widely different. To understand this mixture of commonality and difference I have suggested that we should make use of a basic distinction which occurs in some form within each of the great traditions. In Christian terms it is the distinction between God in himself, in his eternal self-existent being, independently of creation, and God-for-us or God as revealed to us. In more universal language it is the distinction between the Real (Sat, al-Haq) an sich and the Real as humanly experienced and thought.
XXXIV. On the transit of Venus in 1769. To the Right Honourable The Earl of Morton, President to the Council and Fellows of the Royal Society, this discourse is, with all humility, inscribed, by their humble servant, Thomas Hornsby
