tualists than among conventional
Christians. The notion that those who reject the Christian (or any
other) scheme of salvation by atonement must reject also belief in
personal immortality and in miracles is as baseless as the notion that
if a man is an atheist he will steal your watch.

I could multiply these instances to weariness. The main difference
that set Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not one between belief in
supernatural persons or miraculous events and the sternest view of
such belief as a breach of intellectual integrity: it is the difference
between belief in the efficacy of the crucifixion as an infallible cure
for guilt, and a congenital incapacity for believing this, or (the same
thing) desiring to believe it.

THE SECULAR VIEW NATURAL, NOT RATIONAL, THEREFORE INEVITABLE.

It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact, whether we
like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe that Jesus got his
curious grip of our souls by mere sentimentality, neither can we believe
that he was John Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead us to
believe that Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense when he
preached Communism; when he declared that the reality behind the popular
belief in God was a creative spirit in ourselves, called by him the
Heavenly Father and by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life Force and other
names; when he protested against the claims of marriage and the family
to appropriate that high part of our energy that was meant for the
service of his Father, the more impossible it becomes for us to believe
that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly announced
that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood
were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the
traditional manner and would rise from the dead after three days; and
that at his second coming the stars would fall from heaven and he become
king of an earthly paradise. But it is easy and reasonable to believe
that an overwrought preacher at last went mad as Swift and Ruskin and
Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has in it a patient suffering from the
delusion that he is a god, yet otherwise sane enough. These patients do
not nowadays declare that they will be barbarously slain and will rise
from the dead, because they have lost that tradition of the destiny
of godhead; but they claim everything appertaining to divinity that is
within their knowledge.