Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/23

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THE RELIGION OF A SCEPTIC

eral interpretation and the allegorical interpretation, we shall not be teased at all by these logical difficulties.

Our Christ will be neither the mystical Son of Heaven of orthodox theology nor the sympathetic philanthropist of heretical hero-worship. He will be a natural and veritable god, a creation not of piety at all, still less of philosophy, but of poetry and the imagination.

We are confronted by precisely the same situation as that which confronted the Greek and Roman sceptics; and we shall be wise if we take the attitude of Sophocles and Virgil rather than that of Lucretius and Lucian!

Directly one leaves the arid rocks of argumentative assertion and denial; directly one approaches the shadowy margins of actual human sensibility, all that I have been trying to articulate takes its place among what might be called "the silences of the soul."

Humanity in reality can never worship anything except the magic of the universe. The traditional images in which this magic has been caught and held will always have a pathos of their own, such as no argument can either justify or destroy. And this pathos, this emanation of beauty, is something completely independent both of faith and of un-faith.

The attitude I am defending is an attitude that

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