Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/18

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, de-