Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/36

native appeal; and there seems to be something about the very audacity of doctrines that deliberately break up the "cause-and-effect, two-and-two-make-four" determinism of nature which in itself stirs and arrests us, as if with a dim intimation of some immense inexplicable escape.

The thing I am trying to make clear is that for us Western nations there has come into being an organic background of solidified dream-myths which contain in them the accumulated strata of all our racial reactions to the universe. This background, created from what might be called the imaginative deposit of many centuries, issues in a massive and deep-rooted view of life which is as Western as we are ourselves. The accident that our sacred books, the accident that the personality of Jesus originated in the East does not affect the situation. We have westernized both Jesus and the Scriptures until the myth-structure that has emerged has little left in it of its original bias.

Out of the melancholy Prophet of Judæa we have created for ourselves a beautiful western god whose lineaments are touched by the sunlight of Greek seas, by the shadows of Celtic forests, by the silences of English pastures; whose dominant expression is full of a sweet, sane, earth-born hope; a hope against which all the metaphysical pessimism of the East can avail nothing.