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Title: The religion of a sceptic

Author: John Cowper Powys


        
Release date: July 22, 2026 [eBook #79153]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79153

Credits: Paul Fatula (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RELIGION OF A SCEPTIC ***




                        THE RELIGION OF A SCEPTIC




                              THE RELIGION
                              OF A SCEPTIC

                                  _By_
                            JOHN COWPER POWYS


                                NEW YORK
                         DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
                                  1925




                           +Copyright+, 1925,
                   +By+ DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, +Inc.+


                           PRINTED IN U. S. A.

                          THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
                         BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK




                                DEDICATED
                         WITH FAITHFUL AFFECTION
                                   TO
                          WILLIAM JOHN WILLIAMS
                           of Reigate, England




THE RELIGION OF A SCEPTIC


The old controversy between Fundamentalists and Modernists has recently
broken out again, as bitter and malignant as ever; and it does
seem advisable at this juncture to give a few plain hints to these
disputants as to exactly how their theological bickerings affect the
nerves of ordinary outsiders!

What these ecclesiastics must be given to understand is briefly this;
that to the majority of intelligent minds--and this includes a far
greater number of average men and women than they realize--the whole
quarrel is utterly outworn and tedious!

What any person endowed with moderate discernment is bound to feel
is that the Fundamentalists are so stiffly conventional, that they
lack the clairvoyance to understand the real human value of the thing
they are defending. They just defend it professionally, blindly,
instinctively; as if it were some sacred idol or tribal image, the very
expression of whose features, carved by some early inspired artist,
they had lost all power of interpreting.

So much for the Fundamentalists.

But what the sensitive outsider feels about the Modernists in this
debate is even less complimentary.

If the defenders of Dogma defend it blindly, clumsily, childishly; the
enemies of Dogma attack it with a crudity, an insolence, a theatrical
sentimentality, such as show that they, like their opponents, have not
the remotest idea as to the real place in human life of the thing they
are criticizing.

Now what exactly is the attitude of the peaceful and sceptical minority
whose reactions I am trying to represent, to the dramatic activities of
these modern preachers?

I think I can best indicate what I mean by imagining the actual case of
some visitor to New York, a visitor neither more nor less unbelieving
than the average but with a deep instinctive reverence for the
traditions of the church of Christendom.

Imagine such an one wandering about the city of New York on some casual
Sunday afternoon; and drifting, first into Trinity Church, and then, a
little later, into St. Mark’s. What would his feelings, his dominant
instinctive emotions be, in the two edifices?

Would he not in the first case put easily aside, as something to be
taken wearily for granted, the explanatory harangue from the orthodox
pulpit, while he gave himself up to the familiar and beautiful words
of the ancient liturgy?

But, in the second case, moving hesitatingly into the porch of the
mellow eighteenth-century building on Second Avenue, already faintly
suspicious of the queer “Dutch Pink” with which they have tricked
up that monument of quiet customs, would he not be teased and
disconcerted, as soon as he got inside, as though by something quite
alien to his mood of poetic reverie?

Would it not seem to him that between what he sought just there--a
consolatory sense of the binding together of the generations--and the
humility of his expectation, there obtruded itself an element that was
more adapted to the eclectic platform of some new Psychic Cult than to
an altar where Jeremy Taylor could have worshipped or where Bishop Ken
could have prayed?

If such a visitor had turned away rather peevishly from the orthodox
discourse of his first venture, he would turn away now, we may be quite
sure, with a much more indignant emotion.

In the first case no amount of pedantic explanation could interfere
with the sober dignity of the time-hallowed words. In the second case
between these words and his own reserved and taciturn piety there had
intervened so many distracting modern sensations that the familiar
charm was altogether destroyed.

To the mind of our imaginary visitor the great traditional
dogmas--dogmas that have preoccupied the human race for so many
centuries--would of necessity have their curious interest. But this
re-interpreting of these traditions in terms of the most transitory
of all modern fashions would present itself to his mind as something
ill-gendered and teasing.

If Christianity developed, as Newman once thought it did; it surely
developed--so our visitor would remind himself as he turned away from
the pink church--along its own intrinsic lines; “moving altogether if
it moved at all,” and not bouncing up and down like a child’s balloon!

But suppose the whole idea of religious emotion were involved in its
_not_ changing; not changing even by slow evolutionary progress, but
remaining the one quiet, dignified human tradition that retained for us
the calm refuge of an antiquity “old as the hills”?

Being the sceptic he is and brought up--let us suppose--in the Anglican
Faith, these considerations would not necessarily drive this good man
post-haste into the nearest edifice that acknowledged the Pope; but
they would at least make him understand how it is that almost every
Roman Church, in every city in the world, is an unconscious hostelry
of the past, where unaggressive unbelievers, going in and going out,
are permitted to breathe the fragrance of old tradition without being
harassed to attack, to defend, or to explain!

The point which I have been trying, in this indirect manner, to make
clear, is that there are among us a vast number of sensitive-minded
people whose unbelief has reached such a level of disillusionment that
all these modern attempts to bolster up religion by appeals to our love
of sensation leave them not only cold but sickened and disgusted.

One is thankful enough that sufficient simple-minded people still
exist to keep the old traditions alive; but what one wants to feel,
when one enters these temples of our fathers, is the solemn pathos of
the passing of the ages, “the still sad music of humanity”; not any
new-fangled ethical chatter.

These theatrical gestures in the presence of things as beautiful as
the Nicene Creed, or the Service for the Dead, or the Litany, or the
English Collects, seem to any one, who is at all reverent in these
matters, as no better than ill-timed levities and vulgar fooleries!

The Christianity that Anatole France laughed at, the Christianity that
Dostoievsky loved, is a desperate, imaginative challenge to the whole
uniformity of Cause and Effect in this tragic world; a challenge that
has made itself into a rich vast dim promontory stretching out into
the unknown; every portion of whose scarred surface has grown familiar
to us; every ledge, every ridge, the scene of some historic crisis in
our race’s history.

Surely the hour has come when the disillusioned of our human family,
standing on this promontory between sea and sky, have become sceptical
enough to treat doubt itself with a certain æsthetic detachment,
sceptical enough to regard with instinctive hostility any attempt to
analyze too curiously the chemical constituents of the rock-ramparts of
their ancient home.

For what is left for us in this collapse of all credible
supernaturalism? To grow just flippantly indifferent to the passing
of old observances? To ignore completely the deep-rooted milestones
whereby our ancestors gave dignity and measure to their days?

I cannot think so.

In the disappearance of all rational justification for the dogmas
of the faith, it still remains that we can appreciate their daring
poetry; it still remains that we can use them--our intellects undrugged
by their seduction--as natural and seemly ways of heightening the
inevitable succession of human events upon the earth.

The moment we come to feel, with what Newman used to call our “illative
sense,” that the balance of probabilities is against our arriving
at any sort of certitude in these high matters, _that_ moment we are
liberated from the necessity of either explaining away these dogmas or
of rendering them more rational.

A rational faith is a contradiction in terms. The essence of any faith
is that it should be irrational. If it is _not_ irrational it leaves a
certain subterranean craving in us unsatisfied.

To the whole-hearted rationalist all faith is hocus-pocus, and it
always must remain a very open question whether the rationalist is not
right!

But right or wrong, it is clear that to _his_ mind the Resurrection of
the Body and the Virgin Birth are so much discredited balderdash; and
it is only when we are in a position to undermine the scepticism of the
rationalist with a scepticism deeper than his own that we become free
to enjoy the beauty of these ideas without denying them some possible
residuum of reality.

The simple-minded religious people upon whose piety the whole
continuance of the thing depends are ready to stake their personal
faith against all discussion.

But the sceptical minority whose feelings I am attempting to articulate
have already completely lost their faith and have not the least wish to
regain it.

The “Will to Believe” is dead in them. They no longer wish Christianity
to _be_ true. _They are glad it is not true._

What such minds are confronted by is the alternative of complete
indifference and the alternative of mock-faith, or theatrical faith.

This “mock-faith” is ignoble, because in its fidgetty and fussy
preoccupations with the little ritualistic details of religion it tends
to miss altogether the larger human pathos of the whole spectacle.

The curious thing is that the people who still retain their faith and
the people who seek to rationalize their faith, both seem to miss
the larger outlook. Such an outlook is perhaps dependent upon what
Nietzsche used to call “the pathos of distance.” Perhaps it can only
be enjoyed by those whose scepticism goes far beyond the defence or
rejection of this or that individual dogma.

For what the Modernists lack the wit to see is that any real unbelief
does not confine itself to explaining away the Virgin Birth or the
Resurrection of the Body. It menaces the whole edifice of Christian
mysticism. It questions the whole edifice of Christian morals. And it
is only when scepticism like this does go to the root of the whole
matter that there arises that peculiar kind of awareness, grave,
tender, pitiful, detached, to which is revealed the true imaginative
beauty of religion.

The pietists who take their faith for granted see nothing of this. The
Modernists who criticize particular dogmas see nothing of this. It is a
thing revealed only to those whose minds have the power of visualizing
the whole stream of existence as something alien to the desires of the
human heart.

The truth is, we have reached a level of human consciousness when for
minds of a certain imaginative tincture what we call Theology has
become Mythology, what we call Morality has become Casuistry, and what
we call Redemption has become the adjustment of a particular type of
temperament to the chaotic jumble of life.

To regard religion as mythology does not make it less important. It
gives it a new and lovely glamour. It restores to it the enchantment
which it possessed at the beginning when its dogmas had not yet lost
their natural poetry in the laboratory of theological speculation.

No cultivation of the æsthetic sense in the presence of life can afford
to neglect some deliberate heightening and enhancing of the basic
elements of our experience, such as birth, love, food, fire, shelter,
procreation, death. And these are precisely the things that, as they
present themselves one by one, Religion in its rôle of Mythology
appropriates to itself and consecrates. Christianity is reduced to an
impoverished philosophy when it does not make use of the sacramental
idea and this is the thing that gives the Roman, Anglican and Greek
churches their advantage over the rest.

Over all the rest except the Quakers!

No one with any feeling for human dignity and charm can fail to be
arrested by the peculiar æsthetic quality of this long-persecuted sect.
Their invincible courage, mingled with so much humorous sagacity--the
wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the dove--their
extraordinary freedom from the grosser kinds of popular prejudice,
put these gentle and subtle people altogether outside the pale of
commonplace protestation.

Their very “Waiting upon the Spirit” becomes a sort of psychological
sacrament, whereby the brutal uproar of the world is transfigured into
an abysmal Silence; silence, the original and mysterious oracle of all
high ecstasies!

And just as religion in its rôle of mythology aids the æsthetic
sense by touching with its far-drawn long-lingering sunset all those
fragments and morsels of pitiful beauty which in the history of our
race have gathered themselves together, like sea-wrack and sea-tangle,
upon “earth’s human shores,” so it has the power of calling to our
attention, in its diurnal offices, all those various episodes in the
day’s life; dawn, morning, noon, twilight, midnight; which, without
some sort of disinterested recognition of their hurried passing tend to
vanish so wistfully, so absolutely!

“Laud we the gods and let our crookéd smokes ... climb ... to their
blest altars!”

And not less, when it comes to the annual procession of the seasons,
does religion play her immemorial part as the great æsthetic prompter
to the world-stage.

It seems as if even our most sympathetic rationalists are guilty of
forgetting what we owe to religion in this slow-unfolding drama of the
year’s life and death.

The birth of our god at Christmas; his death on Good Friday; his
resurrection at Easter; these events and all the great festivals that
follow from Lady’s Day to Michaelmas, have so interwoven themselves
with the lives of our ancestors that they have become part and parcel
of the seasons themselves; have passed into these seasons, losing
something of their realistic value but attaining a far greater poetic
beauty.

And this is why one feels that to grow peevish and captious about such
a thing as the Virgin Birth is not so much an insult to any remote
problematical Celestial Powers as an insult to the poetic common-sense
of the human race itself.

For ultimately, as our average sceptic knows perfectly well, it is
the human race which has invented the figure of Christ and all the
mysteries connected with that figure.

This by no means implies that the Christ of the mediæval tradition,
that creation of the anonymous imagination of the centuries, is less
precious to the world than the historic Jesus. He is _more_ precious.
He is the supreme work of art of the human race. And he is this whether
the historic event at Bethlehem in Judæa took place or did not take
place!

Around that unique figure have gathered all the wistful and desperate
longings of the heart of man for nearly two thousand years; and it is
towards this Christ of the centuries--a totally different person from
the patient prophet of the gospels--that our imagination turns with
such a sense of rich strange excitement.

It begins to grow clear now why it is that our æsthetic feelings are so
shocked and outraged by the Modernist’s questioning of the Virgin Birth
or the bodily Resurrection.

As long as we are sceptical enough, in the historical and theological
sense, to sweep away with one grand swing of the intelligence, both the
literal interpretation and the allegorical interpretation, we shall
not be teased at all by these logical difficulties.

Our Christ will be neither the mystical Son of Heaven of orthodox
theology nor the sympathetic philanthropist of heretical hero-worship.
He will be a natural and veritable god, a creation not of piety at all,
still less of philosophy, but of poetry and the imagination.

We are confronted by precisely the same situation as that which
confronted the Greek and Roman sceptics; and we shall be wise if we
take the attitude of Sophocles and Virgil rather than that of Lucretius
and Lucian!

Directly one leaves the arid rocks of argumentative assertion and
denial; directly one approaches the shadowy margins of actual human
sensibility, all that I have been trying to articulate takes its place
among what might be called “the silences of the soul.”

Humanity in reality can never worship anything except the magic of
the universe. The traditional images in which this magic has been
caught and held will always have a pathos of their own, such as no
argument can either justify or destroy. And this pathos, this emanation
of beauty, is something completely independent both of faith and of
un-faith.

The attitude I am defending is an attitude that would give to anyone
who had, as a child, been baptized into the church and who had, in
later years, desired to be buried by the church, a right to regard
himself as an adherent of all that was most important in the faith of
his fathers!

It is an attitude profoundly sympathetic to what is known as
“Erastianism”; and profoundly unsympathetic to the self-consciousness
of sacerdotalism or the self-consciousness of revivalism.

It is an attitude, in other words, that bears a close resemblance to
that adopted in ancient Rome by the poets Horace and Virgil towards
the gods of _their_ race. It is an historical, traditional, _natural_
attitude and not a mystical or metaphysical one.

But the claim I am making for this particular way of feeling would not
be as plausible as it is if the feeling were confined to poets of high
genius. The emotion I am describing is surely one that can be felt by
quite ordinary intelligences when once they have grasped the peculiar
pathos of our human situation.

There is not the remotest reason why we should believe that the
sacrament of Baptism makes any occult or mystic difference in the fate
of a child; or that the Burial Service does anything to alter the
obscure destiny of the vanished soul; or that Marriage before a priest
affects the good luck or the ill luck of the lovers whose love it
consecrates.

For the very reason that our attitude to these solemn offices is
_disinterested_ we find a beauty in them which resembles the beauty of
certain objects in Nature; objects which do not ask that we should do
anything more than just accept them and pass on.

It almost seems as if a person’s mind has to follow four stages of
development before it apprehends the true secret of religion.

The first stage might be called emotional belief. The second might be
called metaphysical belief. The third, absolute disillusionment. The
fourth, _æsthetic understanding_.

And this last stage implies a recognition that it is by means of the
poetry of these slowly accumulated traditions that the existence of man
upon the earth is heightened and the confusion of what he undergoes
reduced to an endurable pattern.

With regard to the word “æsthetic” in this connection it must not be
supposed that what is meant by this expression is a sensuous response
to coloured windows, to the smell of incense, to fine singing, to
gorgeous vestments, to dramatic gestures, to gracious architecture. A
response to these things is quite as likely to disturb and interrupt
the mental attitude I have been describing as to encourage or sustain
it.

In fact what one really requires, in order to get the full æsthetic
reaction from these ancient usages, is that they should be performed
automatically and mechanically, with as little emphasis as possible
upon the mere _beauty of ritual_.

The æsthetic sense, to which the true dignity and pathos of religion
appeals, is completely unconcerned with the “artistic” element in
Christian worship. It is occupied with something much more serious than
this. It is occupied with the fact that man has so deeply associated
his goings out and comings in, his health and his sickness, his
memories and his hopes, with these particular festivals, that they have
become the illuminated marginal hieroglyphs to the very scroll of his
Life-Illusion.

They have indeed fallen into their place, along with the remembered
landscapes, and the yet more familiar groupings of animals,
houses, gardens, streets, as evocative of that vague inherited
race-consciousness which comes and goes so mysteriously about certain
material things; and which extends backwards so far into the womb of
prenatal darkness.

And because these periodic festivals have been associated with the
whole secular history of our lives the feeling we have come to
entertain about them is something more massive and more natural than
any merely ethical emotion.

It may be true, or it may not be true, that the “logoi” of Jesus
interpret the mystery of the universe with more surety than any other
human oracles.

It may be true, or it may not be true, that the particular kind of love
advocated and manifested by Jesus represents some psychic force that
can actually work miracles.

The ancient religious customs I am now considering do not in the least
_depend_ upon the doctrines of Jesus.

They depend upon nothing outside themselves. What they are they are;
milestones, made of the stuff whereof all flesh is made, holding the
attention of the wayfarer to-day as they held the attention of the
wayfarer of yesterday; binding together all the days of all the years
of our life; storing up in a language heavy with memories, the burden
of that which was and is and is to come!

It is only permitted to a few among the sons of men to realize the
strange deep secret of Jesus. It is only permitted to a few to
understand the mystery of the love of the saints.

But it is permitted to all to stand at gaze, for a passing moment,
before these weather-worn monoliths of the journey we all have to
make. It is permitted to all to use the dogma of the Virgin Birth, the
sacrament of Infant Baptism, the ritual of the Burying of the Dead,
the great Feasts of Christmas, of Easter, of Pentecost, so as to summon
up “remembrance of things past”; so as to mingle some Nepenthe for the
evil present; so as to cast some healing premonition over what is yet
to be.

When an event like the Virgin Birth, when an event like the
Resurrection has thus become a part of the body and pressure of the
years, it becomes something very different from a metaphysical theory
or an ethical appeal. It does nothing to explain the mystery of life.
It does nothing to build up our moral character. And yet, in a certain
sense, it does more for us than any philosophy, then any heroic urge.
It acts upon us like some subtle work of art. It reconciles us to the
confusion of our days and to the labour of our days by enabling us to
see these things in a certain spacious perspective.

To ask oneself anxious questions about the exact meaning of the
Incarnation or the precise significance of the Resurrection is like
teasing oneself with the textual difficulties of some great poem whose
style and whose imagery have become part of the very language we use.

Art always has this, that it satisfies a craving in us that is beyond
the sphere of rational explanation. And these dogmas of the church,
these festivals of the church, are Humanity’s smoke-dark picture upon
the walls of its far-travelled caravan.

And the centre of this picture is the Celebration of the Mass, whether
Roman or Greek or English!

If you conceived of some great cosmic drama that had in it the
sublimity of “Prometheus Bound,” the grandeur of “King Lear,” the huge
concords of the music of Beethoven; and then added to such a work all
that was most wistful and tender in the spirit of the old country
ballads, you would still find that you had fallen short of conveying to
the mind the sort of beauty which is contained in this extraordinary
gesture.

But to understand the Mass, to be affected by the Mass, it is not in
the least necessary that you should hold any particular view of the
miracle of Transubstantiation.

You may doubt whether there _is_ any miracle. It is enough that this
great drama has been performed for so many centuries that it has
created round it an enchanted circle of man’s reverence for man, into
which all spectators of it, however sceptical, seem bound to come, if
they have not hardened their hearts against the burden of their own
race.

For the Mass, however and whenever it is celebrated, remains an eternal
witness to a certain quite definite human experience; an experience
that has entered the secretest nerves of all such lives as have been
hard put to it by fate; the experience, namely, of finding relief from
one’s own personal trouble in the vision of some great reservoir of
superhuman passion.

Such a vision becomes to us as if we beheld in a dim vast mirror the
wounded heart of a universe that had turned and rent itself in a
cataclysm of desperate pity.

And thus it comes about that to tone down with a semi-scientific
earnestness the various great mediæval doctrines that have descended to
us through the ages is to undermine the whole beauty of the Mass.

The Mass depends upon the Virgin Birth. It depends upon Vicarious
Atonement. It depends upon the Resurrection. To extenuate or to
expurgate these traditional dogmas is to make this smoke-darkened
picture upon the walls of the world a grotesque travesty of
superstition.

It is precisely when you have carried your unbelief so far as to feel
doubtful about the existence of God, doubtful about Immortality,
doubtful about any sort of moral order, that these wavering outlines
so strangely limned upon the arras of time regain their æsthetic
ascendancy.

When the differences between old-fashioned and new-fashioned theologies
begin to appear ridiculous, when the whole fabric of Christian ethics
is shaken to its foundations, then is the moment when the dogmas of the
creed and the sacraments of the church appear in all their touching
beauty.

But it must not for a moment be assumed that the humanistic attitude
towards religion advocated here is identical with those neo-catholic
movements in France which embrace such eloquent apologists as Paul
Claudel, Paul Verlaine, and Paul Bourget!

It is no more identical with these than it is identical with the
impassioned perversities of the Apostle Paul.

The attitude towards religion advocated here is altogether hostile to
those theatrical self-lacerations--so different from the planetary
cataclysms in Dostoievsky--which lend so dainty and so fragrant an
unction to the beguiling cadences of French style.

One can call it the “humanistic” attitude; but it might just as well be
called the “Shakespearean”; for no one who has saturated himself in the
mood of the Plays and the Sonnets can have failed to miss that peculiar
flavour, that tender, indefinable after-taste, with its curious sense
of cowslips and cuckoo-flowers in green-wet grass, which seems to blend
a certain scepticism with a certain reverence, as those things have
never been blended before!

Let us suppose a sceptic of the type I am seeking to represent to enter
some hotel-hall in a mining or factory district in America and to
glance casually at the notices of religious services hung upon the wall.

Why is it that he will find himself impervious to the imposing programs
of the various Protestant denominations, and regard with a sharp arrest
of all secular consciousness the simple announcement that Mass will
be celebrated at such and such an hour in those innumerable little
edifices--Italian, German, French, Slovac, Bohemian, Armenian, Syrian,
Spanish, Lithuanian, Irish, English, Roumanian, Sicilian--which hold
the secret of so terrific, so formidable a shock to the habitual
processes of things, that it is as if a yawning fissure were to appear
in the very fabric of Nature.

That the invisible essence of bread and wine should, by a miracle,
before one’s eyes, be converted into the flesh and blood of a god is no
light thing, even in the purlieus of a Youngstown, Ohio, or a Scranton,
Pa.

And the more aware one has become as to the extent to which the
foundations of belief have been overturned, the more affecting it is to
contemplate the mere idea of such an extraordinary event.

But though to the mind of the sceptic the celebration of Mass is
arresting and startling as no theological discourse can possibly be,
what the sceptic makes use of to resist the temptation to commit
himself any further is not just simply his “reason.”

It is necessary to be quite clear about this point. An apologist for
religion might say: “If you go as far as this why will you not go the
whole way?”

Our reply to this is whole-hearted enough. “I will not go the whole
way because it is not only with my reason that I object to ‘practising
religion.’ It is with my imagination, with my instinct, with my
intuition, with my æsthetic sense, with my emotional sense, with every
vague, subtle, evasive, spiritual intimation which I possess!”

It is precisely here that the attitude of mind we are considering,
an attitude that instinctively selects the humanistic philosophy
of Shakespeare as its ideal, separates itself from the type of
temperament, like that of Huysmans on the one hand or Chesterton on the
other, which does eventually _commit itself_.

Such a plunge would be, as far as we are concerned, a betrayal of
our inmost integrity, a sacrifice of the rhythm of our nature to a
pathological craving.

What it really amounts to is this, that the humanistic scepticism,
whose massive and yet wavering reactions I am attempting to outline,
responds to the dogmas of religion in the same manner as it responds to
the whole tragic-comic spectacle of human life.

It is concerned with that larger and rarer beauty, the beauty that
detaches itself, contour by contour, and colour by colour, from the
drama of man’s life upon the earth; from his pathetic attempts to
give that life a unity, a dignity and graciousness, which in its mere
chance-scattered elements it so often lacks.

Confronted with an idea like that of the Virgin Birth, or the
Resurrection, or of Vicarious Atonement, such a mental temper is
compelled to insist very emphatically that a thing _can_ be beautiful
while it is scientifically impossible and morally outrageous!

It _is_ morally outrageous that a man’s sins can be completely
obliterated by the contemplation of Another’s sacrifice. It is also
irrational and unscientific. The metaphysical philosophy of Buddhism
has recognized this in its formulation of the eminently reasonable and
eminently ethical doctrine of “Karma.”

But these unscientific and immoral aspects of Vicarious Atonement do
not detract in the remotest degree from the sense of indescribable
beauty which rises up before us, like a pillar of fire, from the
strange, perverse, fantastic conception of One Man’s dying in order
that the wickedness of all men should be purged away!

If any rational-minded or ethical-minded critic of this strange
doctrine declares that he finds more beauty in the philosophical
notion of “Karma” than in this, it is impossible to convert him by any
argument.

A vision of all the derelicts and abjects in the world, all the
blighted and broken victims of their own wilful vice, suddenly
receiving complete healing in one great Lethean wave of absolution,
either strikes a person’s æsthetic sense as more beautiful than any
conceivable law of “Karma,” or it does not. And if it does not, nothing
that one can say in defence of it can make any difference.

The ultimate quality of beauty in the world differs in this very thing
from truth and goodness; in that, while these latter can be justified
by argument, beauty can never be justified by argument.

No one can be persuaded by logical reasoning to see why certain
magical lines in Shakespeare or Keats are more lovely than certain
clever psychological passages, say, in Browning or in Meredith. It is
something that hits the mind with a direct impact, like the impact of
ice or flame.

For the appeal of beauty is always an imaginative appeal; and there
seems to be something about the very audacity of doctrines that
deliberately break up the “cause-and-effect, two-and-two-make-four”
determinism of nature which in itself stirs and arrests us, as if with
a dim intimation of some immense inexplicable escape.

The thing I am trying to make clear is that for us Western nations
there has come into being an organic background of solidified
dream-myths which contain in them the accumulated strata of all our
racial reactions to the universe. This background, created from what
might be called the imaginative deposit of many centuries, issues
in a massive and deep-rooted view of life which is as Western as we
are ourselves. The accident that our sacred books, the accident that
the personality of Jesus originated in the East does not affect the
situation. We have westernized both Jesus and the Scriptures until the
myth-structure that has emerged has little left in it of its original
bias.

Out of the melancholy Prophet of Judæa we have created for ourselves
a beautiful western god whose lineaments are touched by the sunlight
of Greek seas, by the shadows of Celtic forests, by the silences of
English pastures; whose dominant expression is full of a sweet, sane,
earth-born hope; a hope against which all the metaphysical pessimism of
the East can avail nothing.

And this massive and organic background of our days to which Greeks,
Romans, Germans, French and English have all contributed their
own indigenous poetry is something quite different from just a
sanctimonious appeal to “save one’s soul,” something quite different
from just a pseudo-scientific philosophy.

Gathered about the figure of a youthful god, born of an immaculate
maid, this background of accumulated poetry impinges upon the most
materialistic among us in a thousand unexpected ways.

And the curious thing is that its most touching and stirring
appeals are often indirect and sideways, coming upon us suddenly
and unaccountably when we least anticipate them, like the fleeting
illumination of a dingy street by a wistful autumnal sun.

And when they do reach us, these intimations, they surprise us by
being something quite different from “explanations” of the universe.
They surprise us by being just a quick lovely heightening of all that
is most secretly delicious in human intercourse, of all that is most
enchanting in the by-paths of nature.

To say, as one hears young people so often say, “As for me I find _my_
religion under the open sky” is to be a little unfair to the heathen
element in the faith of our fathers. It is not only of fauns and
hamadryads that one is conscious in these solitary places. Something
touches us when we see a group of cattle in the flickering shadows, a
lonely traveller on the road against the sky-line, that has been itself
touched long ago by the imagination that has made of men and animals
and trees strange prototypes of a more than Platonic mystery; has made
of the growing wheat the flesh of an immortal; has made of the rising
juices and saps the blood of a god; has heightened the value of all
sentient living things by enhancing the value of each individual soul.

Realizing in this way the angle from which we must regard mediæval
dogma if we are to do justice to its inherent poetry, does it not
become clear why our attitude towards broad-minded modern preachers is
bound to be less sympathetic than our attitude to Roman or Anglican
priests?

It may I think be said without contradiction that the grand doctrine
upon which these modernists rely, in their strictures upon the
irrationality of the old dogmas, is what they call “the Fatherhood of
God.”

Now the conception of God as an universal father is certainly due to
the inspiration of Jesus.

But of all aspects of the teaching of Jesus it is the one that wears
the least well under the impact of life’s experience.

Jesus himself seems at the last to have felt something like this when
he uttered his famous cry “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
But the Christ that the generations have created out of old Syrian
stories has detached himself more than we sometimes think from the
illusion of the World-Father.

What man, in fact, has done is to invent a god of his own, a god of
thwarted flesh and blood, in direct opposition to the “Creator” whose
cruelties Jesus condoned.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is man’s sublime excuse for the unknown
forces that cause him to suffer. But the idea of a “Heavenly Father,”
held to so obstinately in the face of the world we know, has become
something that is no longer beautiful.

And the reason why one feels oneself so much more affected by the
mythology of the Roman and Anglican faith than by the philosophy of the
Modernists is that the former tends to lay the chief stress upon Christ
himself as a beautiful and wounded deity in a hostile world; while the
latter keeps offering unctuous insults to all suffering hearts by its
chatter about the goodness of the All-Powerful.

The difficult Athanasian doctrine of the triadic nature of the absolute
is a projection “sub specie æternitatis” of the results of a certain
very simple psychological observation.

Things _do_ arrange themselves in _threes_; and one need not have
indulged in any recondite Pythagoreanism to find endless examples of
this natural peculiarity both in human nature and in nature. It is
difficult to see how else they _could_ arrange themselves; given the
obscurity--except to pure mathematics--of all other dimensions save the
three we visualize.

To correlate Christian mythology with Aristotelian logic it was
necessary to personify this triadic aspect of things; but the moment
has arrived--now that Aristotelian logic ceases to satisfy us--when
this metaphysical aspect of our great legend becomes outworn and
irrelevant.

As we have presumed to hint, the idea of a World-Father has already
lost whatever beauty it may once have had; nor does it seem as if the
idea of a World-Spirit is in a much better case.

Mystics and occultists assure us that this present era is in some
especial sense the era of the Third Person of the Trinity.

If this is so it becomes only the more necessary to clear the path for
a renaissance of the Second Person.

For while the idea of an Over-Soul will always lend itself to minds of
a certain peculiar type, it must surely be clear that the mystery of
beauty finds a much more touching embodiment in the worship of any sort
of real human figure.

The wind “bloweth where it listeth” and all these spiritual breathings
forth, out of the vasty deep, have a weird non-natural character that
may be very good or very evil.

Demonic or divine, they have to do with certain terrible and drastic
obsessions that over-pass in huge volcanic outbursts all those
gentle, hardly-won rhythms of life, which depend on balance, on
infinitely-delicate adjustments, on subtle discriminations.

When against untold odds, when in the face of incredible chances, the
genius of generations of poets and saints, working with the blind
instincts of humanity, have built up, fragment by fragment, piece by
piece, an Ideal like that of Christ, it were surely an inhuman madness
to subject this creation to the destructive tornadoes of prophetic
inspiration.

The World-Father was a well-intentioned and consolatory speculation.
The World-Spirit is a terrific and formidable obsession.

But the worship of Christ, the Son of Mary, will outlive them both
because it touches a beauty in the system of things which they leave
untouched and unrealized--the beauty which does not lie in any
apocryphal abyss but on the magical surface of normal human life.

The lovely and wistful atmosphere of the Religion of Christ is
something entirely independent of the words of Jesus, something
entirely independent of the personality of Jesus. The feeling produced
in us when we hear the words, “and she brought forth her first-born son
and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger,” is a
feeling that goes far beyond the emotion aroused by the idea of Jesus
of Nazareth considered merely as a great and good man.

Into these familiar words has been injected, like some indescribable
essence, all that fairy-like glamour, redemptive of life’s suffering,
which certain forms of earth-gendered craftsmanship, full of the scent
of summer grass and the sweet smoke of winter logs, alone can give.

Not a man, not a woman among us, who has what we so beautifully call a
_Christian name_, whether it be Hans, or Pierre, or Ivan; whether it
be Anna, or Gretchen, or Mary, but must some time or another have felt
something of this.

It is the reduction of life to its simplest terms; and then the
heightening of it with the myrrh and cassia of pure poetry. It is a
kind of diffused secular Mass, consecrating the very kitchen utensils,
the very mud of the stables, with a glamour homely as that of Grimm’s
Fairy Tales; with a magic tender as that of first love.

Our argument could be carried almost as far as this, that there is
something in Christian mythology that the human race would be insane
to let perish from their midst; and that this precious quality can be
caught and savoured without so much as crossing the threshold of any
consecrated building!

It is, in fact, in the intangible atmosphere which emanates from the
quaint and curious poetry surrounding the Virgin Birth that the essence
of Christianity is to be found, rather than in the hymning and praying
at any definite hour, in any particular church.

What this book is seeking to suggest is that the Christ of the Virgin
Birth, the mysterious God-Man, the son of Mary, has got himself _fused_
in some peculiar way with a deep unmistakable change in the æsthetic
sense itself of all our western nations.

A diffused perception of a new and subtle loveliness in the world, has
come into being, extending even to the material and inanimate objects
around us; and having only a faint pathetic association with the piety
of the faithful.

The Christ of the Virgin Birth has in fact achieved the kind of
creative miracle that all supreme works of art achieve; the miracle of
bringing into being a new appreciation of beauty; and not only a new
appreciation, but certain actual _secrets_ of beauty, such as, until it
appeared, remained merely latent in the nature of the universe.

Nothing is harder than to define the precise quality of this new
element; but it is certainly something that does not confine itself
to human minds. It extends to stones and plants and trees. It extends
to every smallest incident of our days; to the lighting of fires, to
the washing of hands, to the breaking of bread. It saturates the very
idea of love in the world, of the most amorous love as well as the most
intellectualized.

Evil and sinister is that Puritan Heresy that has made of the pleasures
of the senses something alien to the spirit of Christ; though it must
be confessed that such a view is not without its justification in the
“logoi” of the historic Jesus!

But the Christ of the Virgin Birth has liberated himself from the
historic Jesus; and all the strange loveliness in the world which draws
its life from Him, all the subtleties and nuances of poetry which
depend upon Him, are liberated with His liberation from his gloomy
moralistic perversion.

The “Idiot” of Dostoievsky, which of all modern works of art
contains most of this new sense of beauty, by no means exhausts its
possibilities. It contains within it, this fresh perspective, many
earth-bound and sun-saturated aspects of life which pass beyond the
Dostoievsky world and enter the world of Shakespeare.

And what a thing it must be, this new feeling, when one thinks how
different in their imaginative response of life both Shakespeare and
Dostoievsky are, from any minds that contemplated existence _before_
the Christ of the Virgin Birth got himself diffused through the
troubled mirror of our experience!

One thing is certain; neither Dostoievsky nor Shakespeare would have
displayed the remotest interest in these eloquent, shallow, sensational
attempts to bring the old dogmas into conformity with what is called
Progress.

What appealed to _them_ in religion was the idea of some formidable
_White Magic_ that claimed to “crack Nature’s moulds” and break up,
from outside, “the thick rotundity o’ the world.” They would feel at
once as we feel, that science and religion must be kept in completely
different compartments of the human mind. They would feel, as we feel,
that from any attempt to reconcile these two things the issue is
neither scientific nor religious, but something altogether inferior to
both; just a vague rhetorical emotionalism.

The magnetic influence of these old mediæval dogmas--crazy and
extravagant as they are--extends among us like a relaxing, penetrating
April mist.

The fact remains, however, that if it were not for the few still left
who are genuine believers this mysterious influence would soon vanish
away.

From those bowed and awe-struck heads, prostrate before the body and
blood of their God-Man, a strange influence goes forth; an influence
that carries with it a touch, a rumour, light as the breath of the
first mornings of Spring, calm as the shadows of the hills in deep
water.

That such a thing can only come from the faith of the simple lends to
the whole phenomenon that kind of tragic beauty which only appears
upon the earth when the evocation in question _might easily never have
appeared at all_; and _has_ only appeared at all by reason of the
incredible encounter of certain chance-blown straws!

The Modernist’s position seems to imply that the Christian faith
emerges inevitably, as an evolutionary product, out of nature; and
that, so emerging, it becomes a growing revelation of occult truth; a
revelation that lends itself to the exigencies of all mystery-loving
minds.

The position, on the contrary, advocated here is that Christianity has
only appeared by a chance-gathered concentration of lucky historical
accidents; but that, once having appeared, there have rallied to
its support all those floating instincts of human revolt against the
natural order of things which without it might have gone down into
oblivion unexpressed and unrealized.

It is not as if one were unaware of the naturalness of these
modernistic attempts to soften down the mediæval dogmas; to make them
correspond with the rapid progress of science.

One is not impervious to the reasonable urge that lies behind these
attempts.

But because of what one knows of science itself it is impossible to
regard this progress as infallible; nor its last up-to-date decree as
any final pronouncement upon the mystery.

Preoccupied with the spectacle of things, one is naturally more
interested in human nature than in chemical or biological theories;
and the great mediæval dogmas seem to us--in spite of all their
irrationality--to correspond to certain aspects of human nature that
have not altered very much in the lapse of the centuries.

Many such aspects may not appear to be particularly beautiful to a
taste which is careful to obliterate every pessimistic interpretation
of life. But to a mind that responds to a darker, more sinister view of
things, as well as to a more consolatory one, these ambiguous aspects
fall into their place with the rest.

The Orphic, Mithraic, and Eleusinian Mysteries undoubtedly hinted at
many of the imaginative conceptions in Christian dogma. The worship
of Osiris must have anticipated many more. But it is in the blending
of the race-vision of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome that the astounding
doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection managed to reach
their human apogee.

And when we remember that these notions have emerged, not out of the
lonely brains of semi-scientific philosophers, but out of the anonymous
instincts of the race itself, it becomes possible enough that they
may afford a clue to the hidden impulses of the universe quite as
significant as the rational theories of individual thinkers.

No one really, in spite of all progress, knows any better what lies
behind the dream of life than people did in the days of Job or in the
days of Rameses.

Still over our heads and under our feet stretches the incredible
monstrosity of boundless space. Still before us and behind us stretches
the incredible monstrosity of boundless time. Still when we sink
into our minds we find the movements of consciousness itself turning
eternally in one and the same fatal circle.

Science reduces everything to invisible electric forces, mathematics to
invisible logical entities; but meanwhile the _visible earth_ remains,
brown and green and grey; and the darkness and the light make up the
procession of our irreducible hours.

The metaphysicians hypostasize the processes of the human mind
into unreal eidolons. Out of the wavering mythologies created by
poets, theologians build up complicated dogmatic systems. The priest
conserves as sacrosanct what the prophet announces as inspired. And
all the while, the natural-minded ordinary man, looking round upon the
unsolved, unaltered mystery, remains sceptical, ironical, patient,
silent!

One thing is certain. The vast material universe which we are compelled
to contemplate out there in the void, stretching immeasurably to
unthinkable horizons, _is not all there is_.

From the vantage-ground of some secret citadel in the depths of our
being we are aware, beyond all doubt, that this particular spectacle
does not exhaust the possibilities of being. But whether we, who know
that this material universe _is not all_, will ever share, more fully
than in our limited consciousness we are sharing now, these other
levels of existence is a question beyond the reach of any human reply.

Vast cosmic purposes may be at work, completely unsympathetic to our
natural cravings. Choosing us, using us, abusing us, in imperturbable
indifference, they may be pursuing objects as far beyond our objects
as ours are beyond those of midges and flies.

Towards these forces, which have summoned us forth from the deep,
we have, as men and women, a perfect right to be hostile, to be
vindictive, to be blasphemous, to be cynical. To worship these
forces with tender solicitude is ridiculous. To prostrate ourselves
before them in panic-terror is humiliating and degrading. To seek
to propitiate them, to seek to get them “on one’s side,” is natural
enough; but whether it is likely to make any difference is another
matter!

We owe them nothing. _We did not ask to be born._ They deserve no more
from us than the rain deserves when it wets us or the sun deserves when
it dries us.

If we do have to invent incantations “to get them on our side” we do
not love them the better for that, or admire them the more! The account
is equal between us. They to their ends. We to our ends.

The notion that there is any grandeur in “doing their will” is a
psychological illusion. The grandeur, if there is any, consists in
defiance to their will; but even that grows wearisome with time; since,
after all, these forces are so subhuman or so superhuman that even to
“defy” them is waste of energy.

We touch just here upon what is really one of the deepest psychological
alternatives in our lives. A conscious being can, like Job or Spinoza,
make one supreme act of faith and take for granted that the Will of the
Universe is worthy of being our will; or he can, like Prometheus, take
for granted that the Will of the Universe is hostile and malicious.

The attitude more natural to the sceptical mind hesitates and wavers
between these two extremes but probably in the end acquires the habit
of regarding _any_ “Will of the Universe” as conjectural and ambiguous.

What I have taken the liberty of calling “the religion of a sceptic”
is, in other words, something very different from that self-complacent
pose of philosophical rectitude which gives a kind of moral unction to
the writings of so many philosophers.

The sceptical attitude I am describing has nothing in common with
the moral pride of stoicism. The escape it finds from the evils of
life--its sense of a beauty in things that is apart altogether from the
end or purpose of things--is something fitful, wavering, inconstant.
But inconstant though it is, when it does take possession of us it does
so in such a manner as to lift us altogether out of the region of moral
superiorities.

In the contemplation of it, in the breath and being of its quality, all
differences between one human character and another are washed clean
away.

In this respect the contemplation of beauty resembles the Love of
Christ. And that is doubtless why it happens so often that between
artists and saints there is found to be a strange and deep accord;
while, to the rational duty-lover, both these types appear disordered
and equivocal.

The thing that renders the whole argument a rather delicate one is the
wide latitude we are giving to the interpretation of the word beauty.
The popular notion of beauty--and such æsthetes as Oscar Wilde have
done much to encourage the error--seems to confine this sacrosanct word
to the more sensual impressions received from works of art, or received
from the forms and colours of nature treated as material for works of
art.

It is this narrowing down of beauty to sensuous impressions or at any
rate to the imaginative rendering of sensuous impressions which has
cast a kind of slur upon any life of purely æsthetic emotion.

In reality such a life of purged contemplation is, as both Plato and
Aristotle held, the noblest life possible to the human soul. It is
the one life which might be called entirely _disinterested_; for its
rivals, in the sphere of benevolence and righteousness, are, as we
have seen in the case of the great stoics, unable to forget a certain
selfish repercussion of the feeling of moral superiority.

Re-create the response of Shakespeare to some street-scene or
inn-yard-scene or tavern-scene; and then embody the response of Marcus
Aurelius to the same situation.

The imagination of the former, reinforced by tenderness and humour,
both of which can be used to an æsthetic end, sweeps the scene in
question into its own place amid the motley panorama; and then forgets
itself in pure disinterested enjoyment.

The mind of the latter, on the other hand, gathers itself together so
as to retain its benevolent equanimity; but never loses, as it does so,
its inherent moral self-consciousness.

Suppose the same two intelligences to be confronted by the approach of
some religious procession.

The Shakespearean mind would flow easily and spontaneously, like a
self-forgetful planetary mist, over the human pathos of what it beheld.
It would even, so to speak, in its Protean adaptability, _become_ what
it beheld.

Whereas the mind of the Philosophical stoic would exhaust itself in a
grave devoted effort to be at the same time sympathetic and unruffled.

“There may or may not be gods,” the first mind would say. “How strange,
how beautiful, that such hallowed ecstasies should appear at all in
this chance-driven world!”

“This popular worship of the gods,” the second mind would say, “is
doubtless an ignorant and superstitious expression of that Divine Order
and Divine Wisdom that ‘sweetly and strongly’ regulate the universe.”

The great festivals of the church are, as we have hinted before, vast
grey milestones, set up upon the king’s high-road along which all men
have to travel.

One can pass them by without so much as turning one’s head; and for
each person they have different associations; but the mere sight of
them there, as we move forward, is something that gathers our days into
a fulfilled pattern, something that enables us to see the track we have
made, up hill, down dale, “by pavéd fountain and by rushy brook,” as if
from the vantage-ground of a mountain-ridge.

And it is the same with the contemplation of such historic dogmas as
that of the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. To attempt to modernize
these dogmas is to sacrifice all the sweet, rich, dim encrustation of
racial memories with which, one by one, they are inscribed.

It is to scrape off, as it were, with a fanatical puritan chisel, all
those mysterious hieroglyphs, created by snow and hail and sleet and
vapour, that have rendered these monuments of the wayside something
different from what they were at the beginning!

What touches us in them now, what comes to us from them now, is indeed
far more precious than any moral urge.

It is nothing less than a sudden magical sense of the unspeakable
pathos of human life upon the earth; a sense of all it means, of all
it implies, just simply to be a man born of a woman upon this nameless
satellite of a nameless star!

And it is of the very nature of things that this sense can only come
from doctrines that can at least be _regarded_ as actual historic
facts. It can never come from mere metaphysical symbols.

To insist therefore in converting these touching imaginary “facts” into
philosophical parables is just that peculiar kind of outrage upon our
æsthetic sense which broad-minded preachers are always making and which
might be described as “the bad manners of the soul.”

What our instinctive human nature demands is mythology not theology.
Without the concrete mythopœic element in tradition, theology is as
dead as the science of the Aztecs.

With the mythopœic element undisturbed we can be as sceptical as we
please as to the modicum of rational truth contained in such “facts.”
No scepticism can spoil their beauty because their beauty has become
part of the life of the race.

Whatever they once were, they have gathered to themselves now that
particular kind of “truth” that is more important than scientific
discovery, the “truth,” in other words, of a work of art.

What is this truth that is truer than reality; this reality that is
truer than any observed law or sequence of laws?

It is something that once did not exist, but now does exist. It is
something that has literally been created out of nothing; something
that, once created, obtains for itself a subtle re-creative energy of
its own.

The figure of Hamlet is more real in a very profound sense than many
generations of actual living persons. The figure of Don Quixote is more
tangible to our imagination than all the people who actually were born,
went mad, and died, in the days of Don John of Austria.

Not for one moment need it be supposed that the drift of this
pleading for an intelligent human piety implies any encouragement to
obscurantists and reactionaries.

On the contrary, it is the stupidity of the “broad-minded” that betrays
sensitive and imaginative spirits, again and again, into the hands of
these assassins of freedom.

What one has to do is to find not _less_ beauty, but _more_ beauty,
than the reactionaries themselves are able to find in these real-unreal
myths.

The mere fact that such reactionaries are so perturbed about “the fate
of their souls” debars them from enjoying the enchanted moonlight of
these sacred groves.

The morbid question “Am I saved?” is like a dark and criminal cap drawn
over a person’s face just at the moment when the landscape before him
lies floating in a wavering light as lovely as that of a great diffused
sea-pearl.

The history of the human race, as far as it touches the happiness and
unhappiness of individual lives, has yet to be written.

There are moments in the days of all men and women when the things
of their life fall suddenly and strangely into a new focus, the name
whereof, the clue whereto, must for ever remain unuttered.

But these are the moments when a strange justification of all that we
have endured seems on the verge of being realized.

Such moments can in no sense be regarded as rational. They bear only a
very faint and indirect relation to what we call moral issues. The most
rarefied essence of love itself is so transfigured at such hours as to
be scarcely recognizable. What these experiences seem to suggest is the
presence of something in the world beyond the ordinary laws of nature.

And yet they have actually arrived, silently, stealthily,
imperceptibly, on wings that made no stir, on feet that made no sound,
to all men and to all women, from the dawn of history!

There must be a vast recording sensitive-plate of such revelations--for
nothing in the universe perishes _all_--somewhere, hidden from every
search.

And what if these accumulated moments, moments realized by turbaned
heads in the desert, by shaven heads in China, by fur-capped heads in
the Arctic circle, by bent laborious heads in the workshops of London
and Berlin and New York, have had, all down the ages, the power of
flowing magically together, of interpenetrating one another; so that
when, for this cause or for that, or by the mere motions of pure
unguessed-at chance, such a vision comes to any living person, it is
as if such a person drew upon a vast secret planetary memory, the mere
contact with which can heal and redeem?

And what if this great sensitive-plate, upon which are inscribed these
moments, be the very under-sea, the very sublunary floor, of beauty
itself?

If so, one can well understand how it comes about that to those who
reject the theological or philosophical view of the Birth of Christ or
the Resurrection of Christ, there yet may come a thrill from the old
traditional words about these things such as no rational explanation
can destroy.

Grant that these things are no more than imaginary creations of the
human mind. They have associated themselves so long with the rarest
visions of that mind; they have been used so often, as leaden plummets,
to sound the mysterious ocean of nature, that it may well be a marvel
if there does not hang about them certain glittering scales and mystic
phosphorescence of the unknown Deep.

He would be grossly misinterpreting the spirit of this “apologia” who
used its arguments to commit any young man or any young woman to the
restraints of a definite religious communion.

But he would be also misunderstanding it who did not realize that the
familiar words of the old tradition have become by long usage part of
the eternal secular ritual, old as the hills and deep as the roots
thereof, by which man has learned to heighten the life of man.

  “And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from
  Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed....

  “And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

  “And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth,
  into Judæa, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem....

  “To be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child.

  “And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished
  that she should be delivered.

  “And she brought forth her first-born son and wrapped him in
  swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger....”

In the hour when these words shall be read, and shall produce no
impression upon the mind that reads them except the emotion of faith
or the emotion of denial, there will have been something lost, more
precious than a king’s ransom, from the secret sensitive-plate of the
memory of mankind.

“Born of the Virgin Mary ... on the third day he rose from the dead....”

It needs not the loyalty of the orthodox; it needs not the rationality
of the unorthodox; for us to become aware, as we chance upon this, that
in the dogmas of the simplest of the creeds there is a poetry that will
survive the rise and fall of many nations; a poetry that belongs, by
the mere fact of its having appeared in the world at all, to the hands
that receive the child from the womb, to the heads that bow down over
the filled-up grave.

                                 THE END




Transcriber’s Notes


 In the .txt version, surrounding characters have been used to indicate
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