At the close of the seventeenth century it was John Toland who wished to clarify the meaning of concepts and terms by tracing their historical fortunes. For our own purposes we have followed his prescription for the terms ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’. I hope to have shown that these two concepts appeared as an unintended consequence of a crisis within Western Christendom. They were not initially outsider's terms, as Cantwell Smith would have it, although certainly they have become that. Since the close of the eighteenth century, the two ideas have had a varied history. ‘Religion’ was taken up by Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century. He reacted against both the rationalists and Kant, asserting that the essence of religion was neither propositional nor moral, but to do with an inner feeling (Gefuhl). This reaction swung the pendulum back to the medieval emphasis on piety, but at the same time helped to enshrine the centrality of ‘religion’ in accounts of what Christianity was supposed to be about.