Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/21

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THE RELIGION OF A SCEPTIC

man 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

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