the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain
as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that
the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. It
has no secure seat in any single man or in any single nation. It is the
work of the blood and tears of long generations of men. It is not
in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his
customs, in his literature and his religion. Its creation and sustenance
are the crowning glory of man, and his consciousness of it puts him in
a high place above the animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and
fall, but the struggle of individual lives and of individual nations
must be measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the
debasement or perfection of man's great achievement."

This is the same reality. This is the same Link and Captain that this
book asserts. It seems to me a secondary matter whether we call Him
"Man's Great Achievement" or "The Son of Man" or the "God of Mankind" or
"God." So far as the practical and moral ends of life are concerned, it
does not matter how we explain or refuse to explain His presence in our
lives.

There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell and the position of this book. In this book it is asserted that
GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of self-suppression to
our weakness.

5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY

Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture
upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the same
characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the forms of
denial. It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious and resolute
Agnosticism. And it is remarkable too for its blindness to the
possibility of separating quite completely the idea of the Infinite
Being from the idea of God. It is another striking instance of that
obsession of modern minds by merely Christian theology of which I have
already complained. Professor Murray has quoted Mr. Bevan's phrase for
God, "the Friend behind phenomena," and he does not seem to realise that
that phrase carries with it no obligation whatever to believe that this
Friend is in control of the phenomena. He assumes that he is supposed to
be in control as if it were a matter of course:

"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not only in all
religions, but in practically all