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clear that what is censured here is the tone and 

 temper of the questioner, not the questions which 

 he asks ; the presuppositions which he brings to 

 the inquiry, not the method of the inquiry itself; 

 in a word, it is the attitude of his will towards 

 truth, not the process by which he seeks to arrive 

 at it. To say that rationalism is " asking questions 

 out of place" is to assume that we know what 

 questions may be asked and what may not. Yet 

 surely every question is a lawful one which has an 

 answer which human reason, enlightened by the 

 grace of God, can understand. And it is only by 

 asking that we can find out what questions are un- 

 answerable. Nothing can be more irrational than 

 to map out beforehand the limits of our possible 

 knowledge, for this mapping out already assumes 

 that we have got beyond the very limits which we 

 profess to lay down. Neither in the interests of 

 faith, nor on the basis of a critique of the human 

 understanding have we any right to say, " This is a 

 question which may not be asked." The most 

 that we can say is that here we are face to face 

 with a question which has never been answered. 

 But when we conclude that therefore we have 

 reached the limits of knowledge, we adopt a method 

 which, if consistently applied, would have paralyzed 

 reason and made progress impossible. 



It is not, then, either the asking a question or the 

 attempt to answer it in any region of our life which 



