time: the refreshing river 



spiritual good and evil are to be found in the daily intercourse of men 

 with one another in this world, independently of any relation of man 

 to God; further, that the significance of spiritual value does not 

 depend on God or upon the continuance of human beings after the 

 death of the body."^ 



These opinions are not indeed very different from those of many 

 modernist and liberal theologians. The difficulty about religion 

 within the framework of organised Christianity is that the "plain 

 statements in Bible and Prayer-Book stand uncorrected and un- 

 annotated," so that for simple people they mean what they say. 

 For liberal intellectuals, this may be myth, that may be symbol, this 

 may be a valiant attempt to express the inexpressible, that may be 

 an unfortunate inexactitude due to historical causes — but for the 

 majority of people, everything must be taken literally or not at all. 

 Critics, then, have no alternative but to stand outside the traditional 

 Church and give it advice from a distance, so that their remarks 

 acquire a remote and impractical character. But an acquaintance with 

 the life of religion from the inside convinces one that the sense of 

 the holy cannot be ordered about at will, unhooked from one thing 

 and hooked on to something else, or simply detached from ancient 

 traditions and poured into the cold vacuum of our modern mechanical 

 world. The poetic words of the Liturgy, for instance, philosophically 

 meaningless though they may be, cannot be separated from the 

 numinous feeling which has grown up with them. Though built 

 upon the basis of a world-view which we can no longer accept to-day, 

 they retain, for some of us, enough symbolism of what we <k> believe, 

 to make them of overwhelming poetic value^* 



The upshot of the matter is, therefore, that in practice those who 

 can successfully combine traditional religious life with the life of 

 ^ social and political action appropriate to our time, will be relatively 

 few. It is no good being in a hurry to descry and to welcome the new 

 forms of social emotion; they will emerge in their own good time and 

 perhaps we shall not live to see them. But meanwhile, like the last 

 Pontifex Maximus in Rome,^ we shall continue those ancient rites 

 which still have meaning for us, while nevertheless being on the best 

 of terms with the clergy and people of the New Dispensation. 



^ Susan Stebbing, Ideals and Illusions (London, 1940), P- 3^' 



^ Cf. Ste"W'art D. Headlam's The Service of Humanity (London, 1882) and The 

 Meaning of the Mass (London, 1905). 



^ Or the last priest of Zeus in Richard Garnett's story. The Twilight of the Gods. 

 First published 1888, now in Thinker's Library Edition No. 81 (Watts, London, 1940). 



58 



