er, if our race
is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just
as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It
is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is
itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our
thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a
sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should
_anything_ go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good
logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the
brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to
think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I
have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that
ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all
religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent
ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G. Wells has raised its ruinous
banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of
the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours
to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to
come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems
in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the
crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not
organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They
were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind
instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could
be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority
of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these
were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more
undemonstrable, more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to
think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing
it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of
authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her
throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going.