322 HUMANISM xvn 



immortality, and seem to constitute an imposing mass of 

 testimony for the contention that the future life is one of 

 our chief interests. But in practice their doctrines are 

 satisfactorily accommodated to the temper of humanity. 

 The religions renounce the attempt of maintaining im 

 mortality as a matter of fact, and of adducing tangible 

 evidence in its favour. The doctrine becomes a dogma 

 which has to be accepted by faith, and the obligation of 

 raising it to positive knowledge is implicitly or expressly 

 disavowed. 



To illustrate : the Resurrection of Our Lord need not 

 and ought not to have become a matter of faith in any 

 other sense than the death of Queen Anne, or any other 

 event in history. The circumstances attending that event 

 were not originally matters of faith at all : to the Apostles 

 and other witnesses they were matters of direct experience. 

 There was a time therefore when the exact course of 

 events might have been ascertained, conceivably even to 

 the satisfaction of persons like the critical experts of 

 the Psychical Society. And so they would never have 

 become matters of faith, if contemporaries in general had 

 supported a Society for Psychical Research and been 

 keenly observant and vigilantly interested in supernormal 

 happenings : for they would then have done their duty by 

 posterity and compiled records which would have left as 

 little doubt about the facts and involved as little special 

 strain upon our faculty of faith as any other of the events 

 that fall without our direct experience. Thus it is the 

 negligence of the past which imposes on us the burden 

 of faith. Now that such a very simple and obvious 

 reflection should have an air of unfamiliarity is surely 

 signal proof of how habitual has become our distortion of 

 the original sense of religious propositions, of how far we 

 have drifted from a treatment of them as plain statements 

 of fact. But for this we should regard the evidential 

 defects of our records as appropriate occasions, not for 

 affirmations of a faith which glories in its heroism, but for 

 expressions of regret similar to those which other gaps in 

 our records of the past evoke. 



