f his pupils! Yet this strange relation conceived
to exist between an omnipotent deity and his frail creatures, when
intensified by the horizon of another and eternal world, was bound to
develop the tensest and most paralyzing of attitudes. No novel has
been able to unfold a plot which has such psychological possibilities.
And the morbid and exalted religious imagination has done more than
justice to them. While I do not for a moment deny the strength and
leverage this ensemble of ideas possesses when faith is present, I do
contend that the whole creation is unhealthy and blinding and involves
inefficiency as regards the real and pressing problems of personal and
social development. The ecclesiastic seldom has a normal perspective.
Take Cardinal Newman, for instance. Can one deny that this subtle
personality, for all his gifts, brought distorting values into the
current of life? Such a man is certain to misread movements and
activities and to magnify the subjective at the expense of the social.
The individual who identifies himself with social projects, able to
elicit his energy and enthusiasm, is more apt to forget the pettier
interests of the moment in the broad sweep of creative endeavor than is
the person who morbidly catechizes his conscience. A formal morality
which looks inward and never outward is bound to be inefficient.
Tension is no fit substitute for intelligent insight.

{183}

Many theologians assume that ethics has a choice only between reliance
upon some supernatural power for its sanctions, and a sort of harsh and
haughty stoicism, in which the individual stands alone and by sheer
force of will establishes and maintains ideals which are alien to his
nature. The fallacy in such an assumption is not hard to detect. By
his training in the ascetic traditions of Christianity with its
acquiescence in the doctrine of original sin, the theologian is
initiated into a distorted conception of human nature and of human
relations. While man is a complex being with many instincts and
possibilities to adjust and organize in an efficient and progressive
way, it is slanderous to assert that these instincts are evil or that
man, on the whole, does not relate them quite satisfactorily to a plan
of life. Human nature is a sweeter, saner thing than the ascetic
admits; man is capable of heroic idealisms and of far-reaching
sympathies which express themselves in the mold of society. As a
matter of fact, the haug