theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for his
involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his
voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not
dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God
could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to
flout omnipotence--a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk. But
here I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of the
sacred sciences, and that I had better retire before I lose my hide.
This prudent retirement is purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it to
my own sagacity; I ascribe it wholly to that singular kindness which
fate always shows me. If I were free I'd probably keep on, and then
regret it afterward.
XLII
QUID EST VERITAS?
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a
dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African
bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and
intent of God exactly and completely. "For who hath known the mind of
the Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How unsearchable are his
judgments, and his ways past finding out!" "It is the glory of God,"
said Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds and darkness," said David,
"are around him." "No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the work of
God." ... The difference between religions is a difference in their
relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith
is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to
know at all.
XLIII
THE DOUBTER'S REWARD
Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is
far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst
penalty of the man of hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never
indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they
do not enrage him, or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all
the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically
impregnable.... Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The
doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the
end, he may even come to sympathize with God.... The old idea of
fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, is
beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to
think of Him thus? Well, is it any the less disconcerting to think of
Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?...
But he that doubteth--_damnatus est_. At once the penalty of doubt--and
its proof, excuse and genesis.
XLIV
BEFORE THE ALTAR
A salient objection to the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in the
attitudes of abasement that it enforces upon the faithful. A man would
be thought a slimy and knavish fellow if he approached any human judge
or potentate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord God. It is
an etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be
pleasing to its object, for one cannot think of the Lord God as
sacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of abasement,
like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviously
the invention of small and ignoble men. It is the pollution of theology
by the _sklavmoral_.
XLV
THE MASK
Ritual is to religion what the music of an opera is to the libretto:
ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of
concealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrine
of infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the
world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had
to be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would have
survived--uncomprehended, unsuspected and unchallenged.
XLVI
PIA VENEZIANI, POI CRISTIANI
I have spoken of the possibility that God, too, may suffer from a finite
intelligence, and so know the bitter sting of disappointment and defeat.
Here I yielded something to politeness; the thing is not only possible,
but obvious. Like man, God is deceived by appearances and probabilities;
He makes calculations that do not work out; He falls into specious
assumptions. For example, He assumed that Adam and Eve would obey the
law in the Garden. Again, He assumed that the appalling lesson of the
Flood would make men better. Yet again, He assumed that men would always
put religion in first place among their concerns--that it would be
eternally possible to reach and influence them through it. This last
assumption was the most erroneous of them all. The truth is that the
generality of men have long since ceased to take religion seriously.
When we encounter one who still does so, he seems eccentric, almost
feeble-minded--or, more commonly, a rogue who has been deluded by his
own hypocrisy. Even men who are professionally religious, and who thus
have far more incentive to stick to religion than the rest of us, nearly
always throw it overboard at the first serious temptation. During the
past four years, for example, Christianity has been in combat with
patriotism all over Christendom. Which has prevailed? How many gentlemen
of God, having to choose between Christ and Patrie, have actually chosen
Christ?
XLVII
OFF AGAIN, ON AGAIN
The ostensible object of the Reformation, which lately reached its
fourth centenary, was to purge the Church of imbecilities. That object
was accomplished; the Church shook them off. But imbecilities make an
irresistible appeal to man; he inevitably tries to preserve them by
cloaking them with religious sanctions. The result is Protestantism.
XLVIII
THEOLOGY
The notion that theology is a dull subject is one of the strangest
delusions of a stupid and uncritical age. The truth is that some of the
most engrossing books ever written in the world are full of it. For
example, the Gospel according to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's "Der
Antichrist." For example, Mark Twain's "What Is Man?", St. Augustine's
Confessions, Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe," and Huxley's
Essays. How, indeed, could a thing be dull that has sent hundreds of
thousands of men--the very best and the very worst of the race--to the
gallows and the stake, and made and broken dynasties, and inspired the
greatest of human hopes and enterprises, and embroiled whole continents
in war? No, theology is not a soporific. The reason it so often seems so
is that its public exposition has chiefly fallen, in these later days,
into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati, who begin by
mistaking it for a sub-department of etiquette, and then proceed to
anoint it with butter, rose water and talcum powder. Whenever a
first-rate intellect tackles it, as in the case of Huxley, or in that of
Leo XIII., it at once takes on all the sinister fascination it had in
Luther's day.
XLIX
EXEMPLI GRATIA
Do I let the poor suffer, and consign them, as old Friedrich used to
say, to statistics and the devil? Well, so does God.