time: the refreshing river 



anonymous writer recently began an article on agnosticism with the 

 words: "The essence of religion is faith, the ability to accept as a 

 truth a hypothesis for which there is no positive evidence."^ Or 

 again, in Moscow Dialogues, Socratov says,^ "We are rather at a loss 

 to point to anything of a positive character in religion. If you can 

 suggest anything positive, I shall be glad to hear it"; and the Bishop 

 (very conveniently) replies, "Well, first of all, the Church has always 

 stood, even in its darkest days, for law and order." The first of these 

 writers was confusing, as is so common, theology with religion. 

 Theology has to accept hypotheses for which there is no positive 

 evidence, because in a system so unlikely as the universe, of which 

 there is only one, no comparisons can be made by which to test the 

 credibility of anything. This is no argument in favour of theology, 

 which may or may not be a necessary evil, but on the other hand, 

 it does not discredit religion. The second was erecting an episcopal 

 man of straw in order to have the pleasure of hearing the opium- 

 merchant give himself away red-handed. But the statement is not 

 historically true; when Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian were alive; 

 when Lilburne, Rainborough, and their "russet-coated captains" were 

 riding; the Church was not on the side of law and order. Christians 

 were able to imagine a better law and a juster order than the established 

 system of the Roman Empire,^ or the government of that "Man of 

 Blood," King Charles I. 



The clearest understanding of religion has been given, in my view, 

 by the work of Rudolf Otto,^ a German theologian, who described 

 it as the sense of the holy. In primitive communities we see this 

 "numinous sense" applied to all kinds of worthless objects and rites, 

 and later incorporated in the apparatus of State government, but in 

 the great religions of the world it forms the essential backbone of the 

 experience of their participators. In Christianity, where the ethic of 

 love found its greatest prophets, the numinous sense has become 

 attached to the highest conception of the relations between man and 

 man that we know. The christian who becomes a communist does so 

 precisely because he sees no other body of people in the world of 

 our time who are concerned to put Christ's commands into literal 



^ New Statesman, 1934, 8, 332 (September 15th). 



^ Hecker, J., Moscow Dialogues (Chapman & Hall, London, 1933), p. 191. 



^ On the socialism of the Apostolic Fathers, see the essay of Charles Marson in the 

 collective work by Tom Mann and others, Fox Clamantium, ed. Andrew Reid (London, 

 1894); and also his God's Co-operative Society (Longmans, Green, London, 1914). 



^ See especially Otto, R., The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 1923). 



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