DEO IGNOTO. Propositions to the Maintenance of Theism. - No. I. The Choice.

 

DEO IGNOTO.

Propositions to the Maintenance of Theism.

‘That which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of Life, declare we unto you.’ 1 John. i. 1.

—

No. I. The Choice.

WHOSO would live in a universal accordance with reality must settle the question of the meaning of life. The question is simple: is there a profound meaning to this short and painful life, or is there not? For if there is any meaning to this transitory life it could only be profound. Yet if it has no profound meaning, if it has no extraordinary and overarching purpose, then truly it may be called meaningless. All the trifles and fascinations of to-day, into which mankind have poured so vast a body and so distressing a tax of care, were then but the jests of eternity. For it is said with a persuasive accuracy that the sun will engulf the earth in some four and a half billions of years. Before that time it will evaporate the seas. Before that time it will scorch the plants. Long before that time it will slay the animals. What then of material progress? The solar system will fall, after the collapse of the sun, into an abysm of darkness. Science asserts, and science is an honourable thing, that the galaxies will follow, and the nebulæ, and the phosphors, and the elements, and every illumined thing which illumines throughout the circumscribed universe shall die. Vast tornadoes of deepest darkness will rip apart the very fabric of matter, consuming all things, all energy, force, and dimension, crushing the hands of time, bequeathing only an eternal and arctic night to a shattered universe. Indeed enough of material progress.

   Profound things have profound meanings–that is self-evident, and the profoundest thing must have the profoundest meaning–that is necessary; therefore if once it could be agreed that the universe is profound, that these well-met deductions assume only an infinitesimal part of its reality, and that the human mind cannot retain even an ounce of the ultimately futile but materially applicable gleanings of science, then might mankind avoid the immense despair which the fatalist philosophies induce. What however might be the character of this profundity? It is in the nature of scientific reasoning to subordinate nature to man; if the law of gravitation is discovered it is because the mind of man has superseded its mysteries; if the theory of relativity is concluded it is concluded because its effects are traced and delimited by a superior power (for if it is power to act it is power indeed to understand since understanding enables acts beyond mere force). Hence the scientist subordinates nature to his comprehension and preens himself, perhaps unconsciously, with the thought that after all the universe itself is not enough to withstand his insight. Yet the scientist in the end must die, and in the silent unmarked victory of the universe over every living man—the victory which quells them all into silence and decay—the true and utter superiority of mystery over reasoning is established. Science only proves a thing when it disproves all others, that is why all other things disprove science.

   To think so is not of course to disdain the worldly uses of science, but it is to relegate its universal significance. Science is a marvellous sphere of mental enterprise that is always diverting, often useful, and sometimes virtuous. Its growth and efflorescence has been one of the most remarkable effects of Christian civilisation. It is everywhere limited however; there are always points at which one study must end and another begin—ignoring the chasms between. General relativity is very accurate and splendid in matters pertinent to telescopic bodies. The experiments of a century have ratified much which its strange doctrine presupposed, but where it ends, which is where mass as mass itself must dissipate, it ceases to be true. What is true of the infinite of outer space is false of the infinite infinitesimal of the sub-atomic. Where general relativity is right quantum theory is wrong, where quantum theory is right general relativity is wrong, but each theory examines the same universe with opposite principles. Where atomic theory falters chemical theory marches, where chemical theory sinks D.N.A. theory floats, where D.N.A. theory suffocates the arts breathe. What then is one to believe? Only that scientific law is not so indisputable as too many presuppose.

   Science is excellently limited, nor could it ever be otherwise. Its methods are always confining phenomena into formulæ, which would be very apt if phenomena were not the gigantic riddles they undoubtedly are. They annihilate suns, they bend time, they freeze fire, they burn water, they rupture planets, they scourge the firmament with electrical whips, they burst galaxies, they amalgamate nebulæ, and how much is really observed, or how much is truly observable? Science harnesses the quantities it may, and deduces the postulates it can, but it everywhere creaks with the burden of its restraints. All observable life is reproduced, yet science must postulate the never observed event of abiogenesis in order to explain any of it. This is but one example of the vast and mysterious element of truth becoming partially visible, like the dark ocean at night, near the feeble flicker of science’s lantern. In the scientific homes of to-day, which hum with the activity of high-voltage machinery, it is difficult to think that man is really so powerless. He is accustomed to his absolute mastery upon earth. Yet what is more analogous of the earth to the universe than the comparison of a half-acre garden to the earth? Even that were a generous illustration, for the universe is necessarily infinite; however let that issue pass for the moment, and let the chief object of reflection be upon this certain and profound matter of man’s, and the earth’s, insignificance.

 

   Not the smallest coloured mark in this picture could be anything less than fifty times the size of earth; such a fact should lend force to the modesty of thought, yet consistently in the generations which have followed the twentieth-century, generations which may loosely be designated scientific, western trust has migrated away from religious philosophy. For various reasons, many of them quite sensible, the faith in revelation, organised worship, ecclesiastical dignity, and theological wisdom, has been shaken, not to say destroyed. The fact is that the majority of scientists, and with them the majority of the public, simply no longer presume there to be any God at work in the universe. They live in a crumbling existence. According to their conceptions we are all under sentence of eternal death. It is a cold, a remote, and a friendless, universe, without consolation or justification, without any evidence for hope or authentic proof of wisdom, so they must admit. For if man cannot admit a God in the universe he must admit a devil in his heart; if he cannot grant the universe sovereignty and power over itself (which is the fundamental cause of theistic belief) then he cannot grant anything else, for the setting determines the action. He cannot, in such a system of thought, grant individual progress, nor particular merit, nor human destiny, nor courage nor ease—and yet he does. If man believes in a higher power, that he makes his God, if man does not so believe, himself he makes his God. Either way, man will have his God, for it is only when we feel there to be a purpose in the universe that we feel there to be a purpose on earth; it is only when we feel there to be a meaning to all existence that we feel there can be any meaning to ours.

   Therefore, I ask again, will man believe in belief and will he believe in God? Will he believe in the beacon so that he may believe in the light, or will he not? Will he not believe that life is the rule of the universe, will he call life a strange exception to death, will he not believe that the threads are unified, will he call the light fading, and will he believe in himself when, for want of a final vindication, he ceases to believe in anything at all?

   This is Pascal’s wager, the very sound logic most famously espoused by that great mathematician and philosopher, which asserts that when a person is confronted with the necessary choice of two beliefs, in only one of which there is the potential of true consolation, it is only rational and commendable to choose the belief with the positive potential. To choose the other, in which there is the certainty of no ultimate consolation, is to forego a tremendous opportunity in life. Nothing or little is lost in choosing the belief with potential, something great might yet be gained, but nothing can be gained through choosing the other belief; to do so must be judged both irrational and distasteful. As Dr. Johnson observed in debating this very subject, ‘Why, Sir, the greatest concern we have in this world, the choice of our profession, must be determined without demonstrative reasoning. Human life is not yet so well known, as that we can have it. And take the case of a man who is ill. I call two physicians: they differ in opinion. I am not to lie down, and die between them: I must do something.’

   I tried once to explain this argument to my younger brother, but he would not see its essence as I see it. He pronounced, after many an inadequate and forlorn speech of mine, that, ‘If you believe in God because you wish to, not because it is likely, then that is a false belief!’ Such striking rejoinders are the more striking the more simply and briefly they are expressed. They isolate one aspect, heap so many tons of scorn and ridicule upon it, and believe they have defeated the argument. In fact they have only defeated the purpose. Doubts should exist only to be resolved, they should be warning lights not destroying fires. When they are employed as the means of destroying confidence in fundamental trusts they are misused. They become like medicines which cure in their intended measure but which kill in overdoses. To say theism is false because it is hopeful is mistaken. A belief may be hopeful and false, a belief may be hopeful and true, but whether a belief be true or false it is always the brighter for being hopeful. To eat food is a hopeful act. It may be that to eat food is really without purpose if existence itself is without purpose, but that its belief is hopeful remains. Upon that basis, the question being uncertain whether existence, and therefore eating, has a purpose, people generally elect to be hopeful amidst doubt and eat food. If a man sat at a table of carefully prepared food and resolved, while all the merry company around were dining under the salutary impulse of optimism, not to eat a morsel, it would be unanimously felt by those others present that something was wrong with him. If, being asked, the companion declared that he refused to eat because there was no proof that eating was purposeful it would be replied, ‘Well, it may be purposeless, it may be purposeful, but while you are in doubt act according to your interests and feelings’. It is just so with theism.

   Yet people believe in God both because it is good to believe it—because they wish to believe it—and also because they have recognised that there are numerous and powerful strains of reason which really lend probability to it. My brother implied in his criticism that those concurrent with the logic of Pascal’s wager maintained a false belief because optimism is its main motivation. The fact that optimism is always a motive force in human decisions, even in suicide, it is unnecessary at length to contend. It is well known that the first principle of life is self-interest, and that there are measures of partiality and hope even in sacrifice or slaughter. The cause however of this view, that a belief formed through Pascal’s wager is false because based in hope and not mistrust, is entirely due to a deliberate isolation of thinking. My brother only armed himself with the swift arrows of this opinion because he viewed it not as an accompaniment but as the sole guarantee of theistic evidence. Such an interpretation was patently never the intention of the argument.

   The argument was only ever intended, and in fact only fully serves, to reinforce the rational and mystic evidences for theism when a theist is caught in the dilemmas of reason. Throughout much of the history of Europe the authority of the Bible, and of various churches’ interpretation of it, was considered greater than the authority of anything else. Galen might suggest how to cure our mortal flesh but the gospels knew how to save immortal souls. The result was often that paradoxes furnished by the citation of scripture created serious difficulties with people who, understandably but mistakenly, depended entirely upon the Bible for the validation of their faith. The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. Anything outside context, and many things inside context, can be warped to the point of inversion. The Bible taken in trust, especially the moral teachings of the New Testament, Job, Jonah, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, and the peaceful Psalms, is a great body of wisdom and devotion; but the Bible taken indiscriminately, viewed not as a body of meaningful words but simply as a huge matrix of letters, of which any may be plucked at random like the feather of a raven and used to quill a thousand heresies, is a Pandora’s box of mischief: it is but another excuse for abuse.

   Therefore something greater than mere authority is required. This is admitted in science as well, no authority is so famous as that it may not be questioned and perhaps entirely refuted. The spirit of enquiry is all in science, and the spirit of devotion is all in religion. Without this spirit the Bible is a fairy book; with this spirit it is the key to unlocking the great mystery of human existence. Reasons can sometimes serve as auxiliaries to the spirit when circumstances prove particularly dampening, and amongst these auxiliaries Pascal’s wager will always retain a high place due to its considerable pragmatic force. For atheists have been too long accustomed to thinking they have a monopoly in the neighbourhood of pragmatism; indeed they have. As they looked onto the celestial steeples of the old city, with  its vast cathedral’s great and gothic towers, at the ringdoves fluttering to the sound of its morning bells, and as God brushed His pigment-stained fingers across the morning sky’s canvass, they might have felt a pang of longing; a pang especially heightened by looking onto their own quarters in the new districts of the city, where warped and wonky buildings clad with plates of glass reveal floor after floor of undisputed misery. They might have admitted theirs was a less romantic world but the solaces of pragmatism, its monetary gains, and the material gains of money, doubtless would have eased them. But how great would be the revulsion of their feeling if it were made known to them that all their pragmatism was madness, and all their gain but loss! For while they nourished this pragmatism of men they had starved the pragmatism of devotional insight, and all the while they gorged on the gain of material wealth their bodies thinned, their faces paled, their lips became encrusted, and their eyes grew hollow, at the development of a pernicious deficiency in Faith.

   People do often speak of the absurdity of theism before a comparison of empirical or deductible logic. They little think of the many absurdities of their own lives, as well as the very logic which, judged in its effects, causes the most monstrous vanities and extravagances. Indeed there have been ostensibly good atheists, but in a matter of this kind it is vital to notice the distinction between the followers of a name and the followers of a faith. If a man who calls himself an atheist, because he has been intellectually convinced that it is the more correct thing to call one’s self, yet begins each morning with hope and trust, renewing his determinations to do good to his fellow creatures, and also to allow some moderated good to himself, employing true patience with courage (the two sureties of virtue), kindness with discipline, and humility with honour, that man is a behavioural theist. The atheism he has been brought to espouse has had no effect upon his conduct. Clearly it is not an accepted view, for if it were an accepted view a great despair must be the consequence, and into the voids of despair are inevitably drawn the flotsam and jetsam of weakness and vice. Confidence that one’s life is justified, increased through the conductor of faith and actuated by the lightning of mystery, is good; but confidence that one’s life is alone justified by sheer personal merit, irrespective of all exterior context or significance, will always be the most common cause of the crime of arrogance. Mystery is revealing. It strips the masks of conceit. Mystery is humbling, for it bodes more than we know. Mystery is truth. It permeates every thought in our minds.

   What is this mystery? It must be a paradoxical question to ask. If it were known it were neither profound nor a mystery; a plumb line cannot reach the bed of the Atlantic, and if ever it could an oceanic creature would eat it in half before it could be hauled to the surface. All that may be gathered of such an experiment therefore is what the complex emotions suggest. When a man asks himself the question, at sea or alone, underground or when friendless, whether there is a real meaning to the totality of existence, and not simply a set of meanings composed to befit a few of its parts, he must guess according to his feelings. If it is supposed that there is no meaning then nothing further can be decided, all the trials of life must be met without any belief that they are either useful or meaningful. If the satisfaction of the body therefore becomes the compass of conduct (for the stomach, the tongue, and the flesh generally, know very well what they prefer) then at the least a mental presumption of personal merit is concluded. No rational basis for preserving another’s life before one’s own, or dying for something conceptually dearer than one’s self, could be formed in that pure hedonism. Therefore it is important to understand that it is a necessity (in the literally rational consequences of this choice, which decides that there is no real meaning to the totality of existence) that absolute selfishness is the result. The mind is made forfeit, a mere servant of bodily experience; a pig were equal to a man in such a state, except that the ingenuity of man can make him more pig than pig. The pig may wallow in mud but the man may wallow in money, food, drink, or even the self-deception that he is either good or happy. If any such believers in flesh as the true guide to reason or purpose attempted to maintain selflessness, whether in regard to political conviction, familial loyalty, or anything else, they must be secretly faithful to a conception of existence’s totality. They must be, or they must be liars. It is furthermore observed accurately that the selfish cannot possibly have any love for posterity, for posterity has never done anything for them.

   It has been remarked that those who reject a faith in the mysterious profundity of the complete existence around them inevitably set up a mistaken faith in something smaller. Marx put his in total government and Stalin was the consequence; Hitler put his in violence and the Holocaust was the consequence. Each of these people were atheists. Yet to a lesser extent it can be seen in the ordinary habits of ordinary people. Why must they be so restless, why was everything good before and must be bad hereafter, why is consumption elevated above creation? Why is it a matter of indifference whether a house has the architectural merit of a shoe box? Why is it a matter of indifference whether a man is dressed less tidily than a scarecrow? Surely because none of these things can be possibly accounted of any import or significance if they are only considered the fancies of variable taste. Once they were the effects of a love of beauty justified and originated in God, now they are lonely ruins in an ugly new age. Quæ fuerunt vitia, mores sunt.

   Every intellectual endeavour should be in lieu of God or in honour of God. Thus a scientist might seek to discover a substance or phenomenon in lieu of a theory of God, or he might seek to discover something in honour of a belief in God, but he ought never to seek impossibly and irresponsibly to disprove the very idea of God, which is the highest and noblest conception of mortality, as God is the only being capable of redeeming any value in science at all. For if the existence of mankind is in all points futile otherwise, if everything they have achieved must be consummated in the earth’s annihilation, then surely it is a pitiful self-deception to suggest that a little temporal use is of any true value. Therefore great energies should be directed to achieving the conviction of faith, in order to justify existence itself. No human view is superior to that.

   Let the question be considered thus: if God exists it is of the utmost importance that we should believe in Him, for if God exists we cannot possibly understand our existence without thinking of Him. If God does not exist it is of no importance whether we believe in Him or no, as scientific investigation has always proceeded with and without such a belief, either by interpreting all scientific deduction through God’s will, or else through the notion of life crumbling into mineral death. It stands to reason therefore that we should believe in God, if only because such a sublime and comforting faith might illuminate the darkness around the edges of our temporal knowledge. Naturally there are other considerations, but this is an additional; strong rope is woven of many fibres.

   It is consequently both happier and wiser to believe in the one ultimate God of the true monotheist. The positive choice in Pascal’s wager loses nothing in life that is not worth losing, such as a conceited hedonism and that blind self-interest which pleases itself while it pleases nothing else, but it gains greatly in humility and hope. It also enables that trust in intellectual enquiries which is the guarantor of their every success, that trust which warrants our efforts because they are a part of His constant efforts, that trust which the workman has in his firm, that trust which the sailor has in his ship, that trust which the painter has in his picture, proving the world quite worthy of beauty. It is something far beyond an ever flagging and insincere vanity, a stimulus as well known and petty as crafted narcotics, aggression, or envy. None of these could ever have stirred a man from his bed had they not been stealthily feeding on the blood of his faith, the undercurrent of all things, and by degrees depleting it. This is in itself the obvious answer to the most common objection to Pascal’s wager about it applying to different gods. For the faith in God is a faith in the ultimate reality, the one and complete collation to which all things refer. Those who try to diminish the good efficiency of Pascal’s wager by attempting to rank Neptune or Zeus, mere incarnations of the weather, with the true God, the only God worthy of the name, defeat the argument with an illegitimacy of thought. For the true God is Neptune, Zeus, Apollo, Hades, Osiris, Brahma, and Jove, altogether, and still more altogether, and more. He is the ever waxing all-encompassing infinite life and vigour in everything. Such is God. Nothing else will do. God is great, and great is His name. ‘If thou desirest to have this intent lapped and folden in one word, so that thou mayest have better hold thereupon, take thee but a little word of one syllable, for so it is better than of two; for the shorter the word, the better it accordeth with the work of the spirit. And such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE.’ THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING.

   The intellectual love of God, as Spinoza describes true worship, is the whole and only purpose of living, and all are engaged in it whether they know it, admit it, or no. To live is to breathe it, to die is to be it. All things have reference to something, even the fiction of the unicorn, which is unaccountably the pet aspersion of many an atheist, refers merely to a horse and a horn. What Englishman has not seen the one grazing upon grass and the other protruding from a calf? How then is a unicorn false? Not in its parts but in its combination only; and as for combination who, in looking upon the immense varieties of man, of animals, of plants, the earth, and the universe, will be so audacious as to discountenance a single possibility? Whether things in our experience and estimation are probable is utterly irrelevant to whether they are possible. The former establishes custom the latter establishes reality. Within the immediate reality of an Englishman unicorns do not occur, but within the immediate reality of ants neither do Englishmen occur. That the ant does not know Englishmen does not mean Englishmen do not exist, just so with unicorns. We know of none on earth, that does not mean there are none anywhere.

   But it is only a habit in atheists to equate God with unicorns because they think unicorns a very facetious notion. Chesterton points out that a rhinoceros would be a very facetious notion were it not fact. The simple truth these examples describe is that existence is expansive. Common sense on earth, common human disbelief, is very justified in human experience, and it is of no great value to worry about whether a unicorn exists in the ordinary course of one man’s threescore years and ten. When it comes to God however it is a different matter. God is the notion of a being who exists and possesses infinite power. Therefore His is a being which in fact accounts for all finite power, as considered locally, and consequently for all our own power on earth. A unicorn, a pretty notion, and it may be a possible one, is not of much import to a Sussex shepherd. Why then is it often introduced as a relevant comparative in a debate on the existence of God? Those who treat the notion of God seriously do not do so because it is a happy lark, as jolly as wondering whether Don Quixote existed. They do so because such a notion and such a notion alone, a profound notion, an ultimate notion, the notion to absorb all notions, is obviously of the utmost concern to them. They wish to give it counsel, and the scorn of so many atheists who cannot see past their own noses will not affect such a wish.

   Of course it is probable that much truth in history has been released by the atheistic temperament. Wrongs cloaked with the robes of theism are revealed very quickly in that state. In the same manner, the wrongs painted over by the liberal paint of atheism are uncovered by theism. Each has been of use and of ill in the history of man’s society, but that is not because each is equiponderant with the other, nor that truth is but a fancy. It is because no philosophy or ideal is ever properly entertained or expressed by men. No atheist is truly atheist and no theist is fully theist. Therefore, when the imperfect manner of each is once donned each has its efficacy against the other, but neither is justly represented. Of the two only one could be true, and in the scheme of truth only positive doctrines are of consequence, but while human affairs in human society are made the standards of judgement both atheism and theism may move in their imperfect duel. When however the lamp of Reality is passed over both, the negative flees as a shadow while the positive lights as a prism.

There, parted into rainbow hues,

   In sweet harmonious strife,

We see celestial love diffuse

   Its light o'er Jesus' life.

 

God, by His bow, vouchsafes to write

   This truth in heaven above;

As every lovely hue is Light,

   So every grace is Love. KEBLE.

   This very immediate concern, this wager betwixt the yin of atheism and the yang of theism, does not concern man’s death, the doctrines of afterlife, or of reincarnation, but the ultimate state of the universe. Should there be no afterlife there yet would be a purpose to mankind, though they were fleeting effusions of matter, through the existence of God. However, it is not altogether unmerited to think of that eternity, outside time and flesh, the Reality, beyond the phantasms of appearance, which Spinoza so well evinced in his life and described in the fifth book of his Ethics; that sojourn of the mind and spirit through and about the essence of God, contriving imaginatively in mortal life His methods, partaking, in some sense, of the immortality of His purposes. Such an immortality might not be a personal immortality, or indeed it might well,

———————For who would lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity,

To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost

In the wide womb of uncreated night? MILTON.

   The question is truly whether there is any immortality whatsoever, and that is another vein into the main artery, another proxy of the theistic debate. Many atheists, accustomed to social merit and the ponderousness of academic theories, wonder why anyone should bother to think about God at all. They know by experience, as theists know by experience, that death happens and whatever may be its ultimate character, whether it is a door beyond or a chasm below, it is the private fate of all animals. They know of probability, and trust it for a certainty. What then is the use of straining beyond this, possibly at the expense of the little estimation one enjoys in the eyes of others. What indeed?

   Suppose you were in a dreary shelter called DOUBT from which there were only two exits. The first leads you into a grey narrow passageway called SCEPTICISM, whose eerie silence is alone disrupted by the loud clicking of your footsteps upon the smooth stone floor. On each side of this strange passageway may be seen numerous exhibitions from history; here scenes of the deaths of innocents; there heaps of the rubble of nations. A long series of large framed photographs entitled The Triumphs and Feasts of Mankind runs extensively along one wall, showing the many pinnacles and extravagances of man’s florid and varied past.

   Occasional chapels are hollowed into the sides of this apparently underground passage; witness the paintings hanging from their altarpieces, often devoted to a prominent cynic of the past; observe, furthermore, the grand fresco of the wild beasts of Illogic, skewered and barbequed by the mythic heroes of the New Rational Army. Notice, standing in the corners holding single dripping candles, the half-dead sacristans of these chapels, who never look away from the paintings, nor ever communicate a sound, except some such affirmation as, ‘All that sparkles in the eye of hope at once becomes dust in the balance!’ or, ‘There was a Door to which I found no Key: There was a Veil past which I could not see: Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE: There seem’d—and then  no more of THEE and ME.’

   These are odd portals where colour itself is but another of the drear’s mockeries. Your legs begin to strain, the passage inclines; to your left are some portraits of the Holocaust victims, to your right the scorched marks of Hiroshima’s dead. Here end the rows of strong electrical lamps; there all is darkness, but a faint glimmer beyond. Pursuing it, you reach the end of the Baptismal Passage of the Sceptics; before you are the cold night winds of the Wide World. The gatekeeper hands you a map with the words, ‘Walk straight through the pitfalls of life and into the chasm of death.’—with which advice you make a first stumble through the rigours of the sunless cynic’s life.

   That is something allegorical of the commendation to atheism; but retrace your steps to the gloomy shelter DOUBT, which is indeed like the concrete bunker of a nuclear defence scheme or of a subterranean walkway; its second exit is barred by an ancient oak door carved with strange figures of words, bordered by extravagant creatures and symbols. Turning the great weighty iron door-pull its locks snap away, its hinges groan, and its timber opens. At once the scent of incense pervades the room and the strains of music echo sweetly about. This is the passage FAITH, a broad pillared nave-like place, with ne’er a cornice nor an architrave plain but everywhere purposed, with import and artistry, and mystery and meaning; the great windows freckling the light of the outside world so that it projects a motion upon the marbled floor. What blues! indigos, azures, violets, sprinkled hither and thither, and drifted as spray that hums in the air from a fountainhead tossed; reds too, deep reds, glassy, shimmer then stay, and all colours that the eye can perceive sparkle as from a heap of rare jewels.

O could we learn that sacrifice

What lights would all around us rise! KEBLE.

   Neither the tomb of Tutankhamen nor the chambers of Sutton Hoo could equal this light for splendour or awe. As in lights so too in sounds this place retains the most exquisite. Traceable and solid they seem, like so many balls of compressible air, that might be felt on the gums of one’s jaw. Many are its tangible yet elusive harmonies cohering euphonic words in hymns and psalms. From treble to bass as ice to wood, as crystal to earth, cold to warmth, and all variety in between, melody wanders a satisfied tenant of art. Here one may enter and listen and watch, and kneel and pray, or stand and think, as upon the summit of a mountain, at the summit of truth. Here where the shadows of life scatter as so many affrighted rodents, here where glory dignifies reality and wisdom sups at its essence, all the frustrations and miseries of personal bias are lifted as a load from the bent back of a mule. In this exaltation a sea change occurs to the mind. Nothing henceforth quite can injure the germ of this FAITH, although too many of its blossoming branches must be felled in the course of life’s violence, nevertheless this germ, if it is there, will there remain. Thus out into the Wide World you may readily step, for nothing out there, not torture nor torment, nor grief and not death, can harm you. For now you are one with the universe, one with God.

   For there is but one certainty in this life and it is God. We are rather like blood cells or sentries in wartime, ourselves we may doubt, for of ourselves there is much to doubt, but not the thing we serve. Everything for which we are glad we are indebted to God for affording us, that is, we are glad to act to our own advantage although we had no power to create ourselves, therefore to the circumstances which tended to our birth we are perpetually indebted. Not even our parents indeed were responsible for creating us, ‘man is not created but begotten’, all they knew was that by the process of conception they would probably produce some beings, but not our beings in particular. We do not owe to our parents our individuality, for that we owe to God, we only owe to our parents our present life-force. They committed themselves to nourish a life, and they did so prepared as much for other personalities as ours. God alone decreed ‘Be it thus’.

   Why then despise the worship which epitomises this truth and elevates all that is unlovely in man and nature? How then is it possible except in a dishonest verbalisation? It may seem an imposition upon man to believe in God, indeed it is a most positive imposition, but everything which follows that imposition is put into a correct and attributive perspective because the first assertion is the greatest, everything concluded after that is secondary and thereupon established. Yet everything established upon atheism, every addition to that state of mind, must be of necessity greater than its foundation. So that whereas the mind of the theist is like the great Egyptian pyramids, its first layer is its largest, and will endure all, the mind of the atheist is like a spinning-top, its smallest point is where it touches the ground, and though a spinning-top may dance about strangely and fascinate and make a quantity of noise, it still remains a spinning top—eventually it must keel over to lie motionless in silence and indignity.

   God needs no proof but men do, and indeed one only begins to appreciate this figure called God when one acknowledges Him as the conductor who leads the harmony (but none of the errant disharmony, for that is suffered by His Grace) of the orchestra of life. One begins, but can never cease, to appreciate God when one realises that it is God who furnishes all light and refreshment, who instils all humour, who generates adventure, who dyes colour, who breathes scent, who nourishes ability; it is God who shelters, it is God who warms, it is God in the dawn, in the midday, and the dusk! How we have erred for want of this knowledge. How priests have erred in thinking it is God in the church and in the church alone, and how many more secularists err in supposing the same! A church is the temple of man, nature is not the temple of God, but God is the temple of nature. Therefore, it should be understood that to elect to be a theist, to be religious, is not to elect to be an obsessive of church. That particular caricature is by now sufficiently understood, and it is clear that such a one can be as sufficiently atheist as a television scientist. Not that to be a churchman is never to be a Christian, but it has often transpired so. Church after all is akin to theological books, paintings, and songs, it is a distillation of faith, it is not faith itself. Rose water is not a rose, though it be very pleasant.

   Without a doubt theism is an imposition on man, but atheism is a reproach upon God, who yet exists in spite of the unbelief of ignorance and charlatanism. It is also a demand upon man’s self-consciousness, for it asks him to believe that he is the highest creature in existence, which would be but a poor reflection on the universe. The repudiation of the worship of God for the sake of other things is like the repudiation of the sun for the sake of lesser lights: a contradiction. For as all lesser lights on earth exist through the power of the sun, so the sun, and all joys on earth, exist through the auspices of God. How then can man expect any joys, or hope for any mercies, if he repudiates the worship of God? To be ignorant of such worship is one thing, a misfortune to be remedied, but to repudiate it is another, a grave calumny upon existence and all which man can love. Its only doctrinal alternative is seemingly that of might is right. Without the being of God paling all other powers in the universe, all other powers in the universe become their own demigod, and malevolent demigods too. For it is one of the most regrettable but irrefragable lessons of history that mortal power is mostly aligned to wickedness.

   Against such wickedness Faith bears up its ark in good heart, opposing and surviving the floods of outer darkness. Faith itself is its own answer and defence. Man let alone is mad. He is an unanchored ship tossed about to his own destruction in the high winds and seas of events. He must have a purpose in mind to make a purpose at hand. That is why the true Christian will often be among the most effective and delightful of men, that is why Christians have numbered so many of the greatest artists, inventors, scientists, and statesmen. Their shield was as their sword, their sword was as their shield. It is difficult to conceive of any nihilist society achieving a tenth of the feats of Christendom. There are no cathedrals in secularism, but there are many brothels. For integrity is directly proportional, not inversely proportional, to enlightenment. This has been mistaken by agnostics caught in the example of Voltaire who make wit and engorgement the substitutes of faith. They turn lovely things like fruit into merely a mass of mulch. Christianity however is the very opposite, it is an example of that wisest and finest quality of mankind: the ability to turn the utmost evil (the crucifixion) into a rally for the utmost good (the salvation of Christ’s followers). Yet much of the character of the true Christian is mistaken. It is often thought that he is a great dogmatist, a weaver of doctrines and bulls. On the contrary, nothing holds so important a place in Christ’s teaching than humility, and what can humility mean if it except a submission to the things God dispenses?

The will to neither strive nor cry,

The power to feel with others give!

Calm, calm me more! nor let me die

Before I have begun to live. ARNOLD.

   A vast number of dark and treacherous avenues may be trudged to arrive at the same destination, and light and broad highways are few. Many cannot be persuaded because they will not be, and many will not be persuaded because they cannot be; if logic is their standard, bias is their flagstaff. Some think their arguments precede their opinion and others think their opinion precedes their arguments. I will wander yet through the labyrinths of old argument, I will swim yet through the seas and lagoons of passionate feeling, but as I conclude this survey of the Choice which this whole work concerns I am tempted to arbitration. Let those who think and feel quite sure they are atheists, and who remain quite convinced that a theist is a very great fool indeed, only hear me once more. For there is this at the least for the most sceptical of people to consider before they, rashly or otherwise, choose in this matter of the meaning of life—for choose they must, ‘not to resolve is to resolve’. It is that, whether or no they trust in the mysteries of religion, whether or no they allow the good or veracity of their institutions or holy scriptures, they must admit that all these works, all these thoughts, words, buildings, customs, songs, systems, and symbols, mean something. What that something really is may be debated, must be debated in fact as a matter of vital necessity to human society, but it must not be refuted for what it is, namely, an extraordinary phenomenon outside all the ordinary impulses of mortal mental endeavour.

   And perhaps in the end the simplest part of Pascal’s wager is also the best, that when a humble theism exists which can provide for the things mortality cannot, when it teaches that we may err and still recover, that we may forgive and be forgiven, that things are warm, happy, and true, in the heart of God, that our dearest relatives may suffer, die, and not altogether perish, that the hope of hope can flag but not fail, that ignorance and anger are but the birth-cries of wisdom, that the poorest cripple, the saddest orphan, and the loneliest widow, may yet partake of the boundless love and joy of Christ, then why, O elect of the world, should we wish to believe otherwise?