Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/19

tached, 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