Once upon a time Dr Thomas Svengali was walking by the side of a lake when he saw some children playing with their boats. They were model boats of course, but it was possible to control them by short–wave radio. In this way they could be made to go through all the manoeuvres which life–sized boats could execute, but in an unrealistically jerky way, like mice pretending to be elephants.

In this short paper, I want to say one thing about the problem of communicating religious understanding. But first it might be helpful to locate the problem in current thinking on religious education.

Dr Lloyd maintains that a teacher's commitment is not only compatible with but a necessary condition for successfully teaching religious understanding within the system of public education. As I am in sympathy with this thesis, I do not wish to argue against it but to add some further interpretation of it. Lloyd's thesis deals with a certain process of communication, specified in two directions: first as to its subject (‘religious understanding’), and secondly as to its context (the system of public education). His thesis contains two points: (1) the kind of communciation he has in mind is at least possible and (2) the necessary condition for its success is the commitment of the teacher.

I want in what follows to suggest – it would take a great deal of space to argue the matter in detail – that each of the prevailing schools of philosophy, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ‘Continental’, has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses; and that to make effective progress in the philosophy of religion, one needs the virtues of both.

Dr Meynell calls the two traditions he is writing about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Continental’ instead of ‘Analytic’ and ‘Hermeneutic’. His main argument for this choice is that ‘Continental’ philosophers also practice some kind of analysis. But if we use ‘Analytic’ in its terminological meaning for that kind of philosophy (of religion) which is aiming at sharp and clear distinctions between concepts (including their uses), then we can well differentiate an analytic tradition from a hermeneutic one which has fundamental objections to present to that kind of ‘language-dissection’ (or better: ‘vivisection’) and which tries to understand religion in its irreducibly individual forms as a whole by means of empathy and description. (By the way: I do not affirm that this distinction between analytic and hermeneutic tradition is a complete one.)