Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/55

It is to scrape off, as it were, with a fanatical puritan chisel, all those mysterious hieroglyphs, created by snow and hail and sleet and vapour, that have rendered these monuments of the wayside something different from what they were at the beginning!

What touches us in them now, what comes to us from them now, is indeed far more precious than any moral urge.

It is nothing less than a sudden magical sense of the unspeakable pathos of human life upon the earth; a sense of all it means, of all it implies, just simply to be a man born of a woman upon this nameless satellite of a nameless star!

And it is of the very nature of things that this sense can only come from doctrines that can at least be regarded as actual historic facts. It can never come from mere metaphysical symbols.

To insist therefore in converting these touching imaginary "facts" into philosophical parables is just that peculiar kind of outrage upon our æsthetic sense which broad-minded preachers are always making and which might be described as "the bad manners of the soul."

What our instinctive human nature demands is mythology not theology. Without the concrete mythopœic element in tradition, theology is as dead as the science of the Aztecs.

With the mythopœic element undisturbed we