fidel" exploring the sky
through a telescope, which he did his best to steady by holding it
against the stem of a palm tree. And yet so literally true did all
orthodox doctrines seem to me that I believed a member of my family to
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by kissing a New Testament
and swearing that one of the nursery maids had mispronounced some
word--an imputation which she had indignantly denied.

This dual mood, as renewed in me by Oxford influences, differed from its
earlier and childish form in the fact that my sense of the absurdities
distinctive of modern religious thought acquired a wider range and went
deeper than I had at first anticipated. The absurdities of which I was
conscious as a child were those of the arguments by which the orthodox
clergy endeavored to defend doctrines which were then for myself
indubitable. At Oxford I became conscious of an absurdity to which as a
child I had been a stranger--namely, the absurdity of the arguments by
which men who repudiated orthodoxy altogether endeavored to establish in
its place some purely natural substitute, such as the "enthusiasm of
humanity," a passion for the welfare of posterity, or a godless
deification of domestic puritanism for its own sake. In addition to this
second absurdity a third gradually dawned on me. This was the
absurdity, common to all parties alike, of supposing that, if the
cardinal doctrines of religious orthodoxy were discredited--namely, that
the human soul is immortal, that the human will is free, and that a God
exists who is interested in the fortunes of each soul
individually--these doctrines, in disappearing, would take away with
them nothing but themselves alone; the actual fact being that they are
known to mankind generally not so much in themselves as in their
indirect effects on that plexus of moral, emotional, and intellectual
values on which all our higher interests in the drama of life depend.

Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the
reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one
kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of
life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism;
and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way
that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel
assent, life, in the higher sense of the word, would--such was my
conviction--soon cease to