eld,
which self-interest has worked out for that very purpose and which is
incapable of reaching any other conclusion. Instead of raising reason
to the full-grown stature of religion, they bring religion down to the
level of reason while still at the stage of learning the alphabet of
its business. To this class of argument belong Locke's "proof" of the
existence of God, and Paley's of a Beneficent Designer. These argue as
though the search for God were like the search for a lost key or for an
invisible carpenter. To the same class may be assigned a more modern
type of apologia, which accommodates religion to the supposed demands
of physical science, or equates the Kingdom of Heaven with social
reform, or domesticates the eternal values to the service of temporal
utility, or harmonizes God with democracy, or with whatever else may be
the popular obsession of the moment--all of them based on the principle
of making concessions to the unconverted reason of carnal men, thereby
sacrificing the higher logic of the spirit to the lower logic of the
senses.

These constructions have no continuance. A slight shifting in the
point of view, a new "demand" from science, a step forward (or
backward) in the higher criticism, a change in the prevalent political
obsession, a fit of sickness in democratic aspiration, and down they
all go under a breath of the logic that created them, the modernism of
to-day becoming the obscurantism of to-morrow. Then the work of
accommodation must begin afresh; new concessions are offered to
"reason," with the result that rebellious criticism breaks out at
another point. Or the cry is raised, by desperate men, that religion
is not an affair of the "head" but of the "heart"--as though a religion
in which the "head" and the "heart" were at variance could be anything
else than a fatal disease of the soul. And may not these apostles of
the "heart" be reminded that their proposal to exclude the "head" from
the pale of religion has neither force nor meaning until the "head"
itself has ratified the bargain and consented to its own exclusion?
Which the "head" is not likely to do.

If, then, we are to limit the word "reason" to that side of us to which
the aforesaid logic makes its approach, we should realize from the
outset that none of us can adduce the faintest shadow of reason why he
should exist at all, or why, in Sir Leslie Stephen's words, it were not
better for the world at large if his neck we