Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/38
of fauns and hamadryads that one is conscious in these solitary places. Something touches us when we see a group of cattle in the flickering shadows, a lonely traveller on the road against the sky-line, that has been itself touched long ago by the imagination that has made of men and animals and trees strange prototypes of a more than Platonic mystery; has made of the growing wheat the flesh of an immortal; has made of the rising juices and saps the blood of a god; has heightened the value of all sentient living things by enhancing the value of each individual soul.
Realizing in this way the angle from which we must regard mediƦval dogma if we are to do justice to its inherent poetry, does it not become clear why our attitude towards broad-minded modern preachers is bound to be less sympathetic than our attitude to Roman or Anglican priests?
It may I think be said without contradiction that the grand doctrine upon which these modernists rely, in their strictures upon the irrationality of the old dogmas, is what they call "the Fatherhood of God."
Now the conception of God as an universal father is certainly due to the inspiration of Jesus.
But of all aspects of the teaching of Jesus it
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