Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/30

that has entered the secretest nerves of all such lives as have been hard put to it by fate; the experience, namely, of finding relief from one's own personal trouble in the vision of some great reservoir of superhuman passion.

Such a vision becomes to us as if we beheld in a dim vast mirror the wounded heart of a universe that had turned and rent itself in a cataclysm of desperate pity.

And thus it comes about that to tone down with a semi-scientific earnestness the various great mediæval doctrines that have descended to us through the ages is to undermine the whole beauty of the Mass.

The Mass depends upon the Virgin Birth. It depends upon Vicarious Atonement. It depends upon the Resurrection. To extenuate or to expurgate these traditional dogmas is to make this smoke-darkened picture upon the walls of the world a grotesque travesty of superstition.

It is precisely when you have carried your unbelief so far as to feel doubtful about the existence of God, doubtful about Immortality, doubtful about any sort of moral order, that these wavering outlines so strangely limned upon the arras of time regain their aesthetic ascendancy.

When the differences between old-fashioned and new-fashioned theologies begin to appear ridiculous, when the whole fabric of Christian