something less than the divine;
nor am I at all quarrelling with it on that account. I am merely
describing the drift of the day; and it seems clear that it is towards
the summoning of spirits to our aid whatever their position in the
unknown world, and without any clear doctrinal plan of that world.
The most probable result would seem to be a multitude of psychic cults,
personal and impersonal, from the vaguest reverence for the powers
of nature to the most concrete appeal to crystals or mascots.
When I say that the agnostics have discovered agnosticism,
and have now recovered from the shock, I do not mean merely to sneer
at the identity of the word agnosticism with the word ignorance.
On the contrary, I think ignorance the greater thing; for ignorance
can be creative. And the thing it can create, and soon probably
will create, is one of the lost arts of the world; a mythology.

In a word, the modern world will probably end exactly where the
Bible begins. In that inevitable setting of spirit against spirit,
or god against god, we shall soon be in a position to do more
justice not only to the New Testament, but to the Old Testament.
Our descendants may very possibly do the very thing we scoff
at the old Jews for doing; grope for and cling to their own
deity as one rising above rivals who seem to be equally real.
They also may feel him not primarily as the sole or even the supreme
but only as the best; and have to abide the miracles of ages to prove
that he is also the mightiest. For them also he may at first
be felt as their own, before he is extended to others; he also,
from the collision with colossal idolatries and towering spiritual
tyrannies, may emerge only as a God of Battles and a Lord of Hosts.
Here between the dark wastes and the clouded mountain was fought
out what must seem even to the indifferent a wrestle of giants
driving the world out of its course; Jehovah of the mountains
casting down Baal of the desert and Dagon of the sea. Here wandered
and endured that strange and terrible and tenacious people who held
high above all their virtues and their vices one indestructible idea;
that they were but the tools in that tremendous hand.
Here was the first triumph of those who, in some sense beyond
our understanding, had rightly chosen among the powers invisible,
and found their choice a great god above all gods. So the future
may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith;
and its fate be fa