ife, and who treat religion as a negligible
element. Such folk forget that while a cat will lap her milk
contentedly from a saucer made of Wedgwood or china, porcelain or
earthenware, and will feel no curiosity about the nature of the
receptacle from which she drinks, human beings are not animals who thus
can take their food and ask no questions about the universe in which it
is served to them. We want to know about life's origin and meaning and
destiny. We cannot keep our questions at home. We cannot stop
thinking. If this universe is fundamentally physical, if the only
spark of spiritual life which it ever knew is the fitful flame of our
own unsteady souls, if it came from dust and to dust will return,
leaving behind no recollection of the human labour, sacrifice and
aspiration which for a little time it unconsciously enshrined, that
outlook makes an incalculable difference to our present lives. For
then our very minds themselves, which have developed here by accident
upon this wandering island in the skies, represent the only kind of
mind there is, and what we do not know never was thought about or cared
for or purposed by anyone, and we, alone in knowing, are ourselves
unknown.

The consequence of this sort of thinking, which is the essence of
irreligion, is to be seen on every side of us in folk who, having thus
lost all confidence in God and the reality of the spiritual world,
still try to labour for the good of men. They have kept one part of
Christianity, its ideals of character and service; they have lost the
other part, which assures them about God. In a word, they are trying
to build an idealistic and serviceable life upon a godless basis. Now,
the difficulty with this attitude toward life lies here: it demands a
quality of spirit for which it cannot supply the motive. It demands
social hope, confidence, enthusiasm and sacrifice, and all the while it
cuts their nerves. It tells men that the universe is fundamentally a
moral desert, that it never was intended even to have an oasis of
civilization in it, that if we make one grow it will be by dint of our
own effort against the deadset of the universe's apathy, that if, by
our toil, an oasis is achieved, it will have precarious tenure in such
alien and inhospitable soil, and that in the end it will disappear
before the onslaught of the cosmic forces; yet in the same breath it
tells men to work for that oasis with hope, confidence, joy and
enthusiasti