Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/24

would give to anyone who had, as a child, been baptized into the church and who had, in later years, desired to be buried by the church, a right to regard himself as an adherent of all that was most important in the faith of his fathers!

It is an attitude profoundly sympathetic to what is known as "Erastianism"; and profoundly unsympathetic to the self-consciousness of sacerdotalism or the self-consciousness of revivalism.

It is an attitude, in other words, that bears a close resemblance to that adopted in ancient Rome by the poets Horace and Virgil towards the gods of their race. It is an historical, traditional, natural attitude and not a mystical or metaphysical one.

But the claim I am making for this particular way of feeling would not be as plausible as it is if the feeling were confined to poets of high genius. The emotion I am describing is surely one that can be felt by quite ordinary intelligences when once they have grasped the peculiar pathos of our human situation.

There is not the remotest reason why we should believe that the sacrament of Baptism makes any occult or mystic difference in the fate of a child; or that the Burial Service does anything to alter the obscure destiny of the vanished soul; or that Marriage before a priest affects the good luck or the ill luck of the lovers whose love it consecrates.