APPENDIX 411 



indestructible, which bids men trust in God even though he slay 

 them, body and soul. 



IV 



' Vain, shallow, and unthinking optimist ! Inconclusive agnostic ! 

 You reject St. Paul's theism. Well, but how will the theism of 

 your chosen prophets sound the bottomless abysses shown to us by 

 modern science ? They knew nothing of those immeasurable gulfs 

 and distances, that time, that space, those unhomely haunts of 

 human thought with nothing human in them of all such things 

 they knew nothing at all, your David, Sophocles, Cleanthes, Marcus 

 Aurelius. You, who have the insight granted by three centuries of 

 exploration, how is your theism going to deal with the incalculable 

 aeons of the cosmic origins inanimate chaos, slowly stirring into 

 fiery strife of gaseous vortices and clashing atoms the tardy 

 concentration of sidereal systems, in furious combustion first, then 

 cooling to white-furnace glow, then building solid planets with 

 their crust of rock and spilth of water, half- dead themselves, but 

 heated by fire belched from the living sun ; the long, stern struggle 

 for existence among things which breathe upon our tiny globe ; 

 the procession of species evolved by laws of which they were 

 unconscious, doomed successively to supersede and to exterminate 

 the weaker ? How will your theism square with this ? Next, 

 how will any theism, yours or your prophets', or St. Paul's, or 

 Mahomet's, or Buddha's, adapt itself to the facts of human 

 experience to the omnipresence of evil and disease, to the dreadful 

 lives lived by the majority of men since men appeared upon this 

 planet, to the anguished misery of captives and convicts, to the 

 clash between natural appetite and social law, to the morbid 

 torments of moral madness and slow-fretting physical cancers, to 

 the unutterable lusts and cruelties and loathsomeness of your own 

 heart, to the dumb, blind, ignorant agonies of dread and longing 

 and self-accusation and hopeless helplessness with which you 

 labour in the dark night-watches, before which you quail in the 

 presence of cold, implacable nature -forces? How will your theism 

 adapt itself to this ? Is it not ridiculous for you to prate of God ? 

 Nay, the superior personalities, whom you imagine to exist, scale 

 over scale, ascending immeasurably far above you in the hierarchy 

 of life, are they not also under the same doom as you, creatures 

 of the same relentless law, enveloped in the same impermeable 

 gloom of ignorance and futile yearning ? ' 



I have often listened to this voice, and said not a word. There 



