A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.

The aphorism argues that genuine religion necessarily involves mystery—truths about God that exceed complete human comprehension. Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican divine, frequently defended the limits of reason in matters of faith and the legitimacy of doctrines (such as the Trinity and Incarnation) that cannot be reduced to purely rational demonstration. In this view, a “religion without mystery” would be a system fully transparent to human intellect, effectively shrinking the divine to the scale of the human mind. The line thus functions as a critique of overly rationalized or deistic religion: if nothing in religion surpasses us, then what we call “God” may be only a human construct rather than the transcendent divine reality.