ver the truths of
religion are too much defended they are cheapened; and when cheapened
they become incredible. Like the love of a man and a woman, or the
belief we have in the loyalty of our dearest friends, or the joy we
feel in the presence of beauty, or the grief of a broken heart, they
resent being made into mere topics for discussion. For this reason
religion has suffered as much from its would-be friends as from its
avowed enemies. To official Defenders of the Faith, crowned, mitred or
wigged, the Faith owes less than the Defenders in question have been
wont to claim. I have even heard it suggested, by extremists, that
there would be more believers in God if all the theologians would take
themselves off.

If religion is founded on Reality, as we are so fond of asserting, we
have no need to be over-anxious about its defence, since Reality can
always be trusted in the long run to look after itself and its
children. We compromise religion whenever our defence of it seems to
imply that its fortunes depend on us or on our arguments, an impression
too often created by apologetic literature--the impression of something
naturally weak which needs an immense amount of argumentative coddling
to keep it alive. I observe none of this in the presentation of
religion by the Founder of Christianity. His freedom from anxiety for
the morrow covered the fundamentals of faith.

The weakest religions, and the weakest phases in the history of every
religion, are those which spend most energy in defending themselves;
the strongest are those which _attack_ the oppositions, difficulties,
disproportions, iniquities, perils and mysteries that beset the soul.

Seen on the self-defensive, religion is apt to appear at its worst. It
rises to its best in the moment of attack. It represents the
expeditionary force of the soul, in its native element where mysteries
are encountered, where the seemingly impossible has to be attempted,
where creative work has to be done and where the call to play the man
is never silent. Most of the quarrels and divisions among believers,
which exhaust the energies meant for a Diviner Object, and deface the
history of religion, turn on the question of its defence. On the side
of defence religion falls asunder into sects which spend themselves in
achieving mutual paralysis. On the side of attack its forces converge.
Religion is rather that which defends us than that which we have to
defend. It stands