Preface xiii 



know nothing of mediaeval speculations. They do 

 know the difficulties and speculations of to-day, and on 

 these official Christian formulae cast little light. Truth 

 that slew an ancient heresy is quite competent to deal 

 with a modern one, but it cannot do so by persistently 

 aiming at the spot where the old one stood and dis- 

 charging a stream of missiles at a mouldering heap of 

 dust. Let Truth turn round and face the new adver- 

 saries, let her discard the cross-bow for the rifle, and 

 she will find them as little invincible as the old. She 

 herself is clad in armour of proof, like that of magic gift 

 in fairy-lore, and nothing can harm her. Of course, as 

 long as we persist in putting a glass shade over Truth, 

 to change our metaphor, so long will our nerves be 

 shaken by the crash when it is shivered to atoms, and 

 the more foolish will cry out that Truth is shattered 

 past repair. Some of our lesser formulae are glass 

 shades verbal inspiration was one and their shatter- 

 ing is great grief to the lower middle class intellect, 

 because they conferred such distinction upon the official 

 Parlour. The admirers of glass shades do not s'ee the 

 tragedy of the younger generation who are driven from 

 their home into the garish, undesirable freedom of the 

 street by the formal symmetry of the dreary parlour, 

 opened only for chilly use on Sundays. Can we not give 

 them sound doctrine in a more acceptable shape? They 

 would welcome it. See how they greet an honest book 

 in which the deepest problems are handled with sim- 

 plicity however ignorant. They have not received 

 enough instruction to be able to recognise the tragic 

 humour of a situation which finds them so ignorant 

 that they applaud when Comte's Religion of Humanity 

 is proclaimed as the newest truth; when Kant's Thing- 

 in-Itself stalks, an unrecognised ghost, full across the 

 path'of a distracted but inattentive Hamlet who cannot 

 understand why his world is out of joint; when Lotze's 



