ght be destroyed without affecting any other part. I do not
choose to argue against that. If you choose to say that, I am no more
disposed to argue with you than if you choose to wear a mitre in Fleet
Street or drink a bottle of ink, or declare the figure of Ally Sloper
more dignified and beautiful than the head of Jove. There is no Q.E.D.
that you cannot do so. You can. You will not like to go on with it, I
think, and it will not answer, but that is a different matter.

I dismiss the idea that life is chaotic because it leaves my life
ineffectual, and I cannot contemplate an ineffectual life patiently. I
am by my nature impelled to refuse that. I assert that it is not so.
I assert therefore that I am important in a scheme, that we are all
important in that scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road and
the fly drowning in the milk are important and correlated with me. What
the scheme as a whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I cannot
know. There I become a Mystic. I use the word scheme because it is the
best word available, but I strain it in using it. I do not wish to
imply a schemer, but only order and co-ordination as distinguished from
haphazard. "All this is important, all this is profoundly significant."
I say it of the universe as a child that has not learnt to read might
say it of a parchment agreement. I cannot read the universe, but I can
believe that this is so.

And this unfounded and arbitrary declaration of the ultimate rightness
and significance of things I call the Act of Faith. It is my fundamental
religious confession. It is a voluntary and deliberate determination to
believe, a choice made.

2.2. ON USING THE NAME OF GOD.

You may say if you will that this scheme I talk about, this something
that gives importance and correlation and significance, is what is meant
by God. You may embark upon a logical wrangle here with me if you have
failed to master what I have hitherto said about the meaning of words.
If a Scheme, you will say, then there must be a Schemer.

But, I repeat, I am using scheme and importance and significance here
only in a spirit of analogy because I can find no better words, and
I will not allow myself to be entangled by an insistence upon their
implications.

Yet let me confess that I am greatly attracted by such fine phrases as
the Will of God, the Hand of God, the Great Commander. These do most
wonderfully express aspects of this belief I choose to hold.