ial hand upon us and
will not be denied? At once various voices rise. Haeckel says the
sense of duty is a "long series of phyletic modifications of the
phronema of the cortex." [4] That is his interpretation. And
Wordsworth:

"Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!
O Duty!"

This sharp contrast is not a difference between facts, which can be
pinned down as the Lilliputians pinned down Gulliver; it is a
difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Or let us go together up some high hill from which we can look out upon
the strange history of humankind. We see its agonies and wars, its
rising empires followed by their ruinous collapse, and yet a mysterious
advance, too, as though mankind, swinging up a spiral, met old
questions upon a higher level, so that looking back to the Stone Age,
for all the misery of this present time, we would be rather here than
there. What can we make of it? Hauptmann's Michael Kramer says "All
this life is the shuddering of a fever." And Paul says, "the eternal
purpose which he purposed in Christ." That is not a difference in the
facts. It is a difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Yet once more, come into the presence of death. The facts that human
eyes can see are plain enough, but what can we make of it--this
standing on the shore, waving farewell to a friendly ship that loses
itself over the rim of the world? Says Thomson of the world's
treatment of man,

"It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death."

And Paul says: "This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruptible shall have
put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality,
then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed
up in victory." That is not a contrast between facts; that is a
contrast between interpretations of facts.

Is it not plain why religion has such an unbreakable hold upon the
human mind? The funeral of Christianity has been predicted many times
but each time the deceased has proved too lively for the obsequies. In
the middle of the eighteenth century they said that Christianity had
one foot in the grave, but then came the amazing revival of religious
life under the Wesleys. In the middle of the last century one wiseacre
said, "In fifty years your Christianity will have died out"; yet, for
all our failures, probably Christianity in all