The religions of the earth do _not_ greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.

It is as if a man were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the _Church Times_ and the _Freethinker_ look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing." The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing.

An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon.
You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella.

It is exactly in their souls that they are divided.

So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery.