gious sanctions. The result is Protestantism.

XLVIII

THEOLOGY

The notion that theology is a dull subject is one of the strangest
delusions of a stupid and uncritical age. The truth is that some of the
most engrossing books ever written in the world are full of it. For
example, the Gospel according to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's "Der
Antichrist." For example, Mark Twain's "What Is Man?", St. Augustine's
Confessions, Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe," and Huxley's
Essays. How, indeed, could a thing be dull that has sent hundreds of
thousands of men--the very best and the very worst of the race--to the
gallows and the stake, and made and broken dynasties, and inspired the
greatest of human hopes and enterprises, and embroiled whole continents
in war? No, theology is not a soporific. The reason it so often seems so
is that its public exposition has chiefly fallen, in these later days,
into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati, who begin by
mistaking it for a sub-department of etiquette, and then proceed to
anoint it with butter, rose water and talcum powder. Whenever a
first-rate intellect tackles it, as in the case of Huxley, or in that of
Leo XIII., it at once takes on all the sinister fascination it had in
Luther's day.

XLIX

EXEMPLI GRATIA

Do I let the poor suffer, and consign them, as old Friedrich used to
say, to statistics and the devil? Well, so does God.

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