RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 9 



or artistic curiosity, or to take part in some quasi-legal cere- 

 mony at which my presence was imperative. 



To say that I am insusceptible to emotion when in a 

 cathedral, a church, or a chapel would be untrue. And it 

 would be strange if the temples of a religion which has 

 solaced so many generations, caused so much history, and 

 brought forth so much literature and art, and which is dead, 

 could not arouse precious and powerful sensations in the 

 heart of the unbeliever. But they are not sensations directly 

 connected with the supernatural. They are far less connected 

 with the supernatural than the marvellous sensations aroused 

 by the sea, the desert, or the night sky. They are more akin 

 to the sensations aroused by the sight of a battlefield, a picture 

 gallery, or a secular historic building. My curiosity about a 

 future life is intermittent and mild. It never inconveniences 

 me. I shall stick to this life as long as I can, but the 

 prospect of death gives me no moral or spiritual qualm. My 

 conscience is utterly detached from any supernatural sanctions 

 whatever. And I am in the last third of my existence. So 

 much for the theory that supernatural religion is a universal 

 human necessity. It is not a necessity in my case, and my 

 case is the same as hundreds of thousands of cases. My case 

 is, I believe, the common case of the tolerably educated 

 human being of my generation and the generation following 

 it. Indeed, readers may ask me why I should trouble to 

 describe the normal in such detail. I describe it simply to 

 rebut the official Christian assumption that the emptiness of 

 churches is due to negligence and indifference, to a deliberate 

 stifling of the religious instinct lest it should interfere with 

 worldly indulgence, and that if people would only honestly 

 think the churches would soon be repopulated. 



The fall of Christianity is unconnected with negligence or 

 indifference, or with a decay of morals. It has been accom- 

 panied by an improvement in morals. It is due partly to a 

 scientific examination of the claims made by and for the 

 Bible, but quite as much to the clear distinction newly 

 formulated by science, and nowhere with more cogency and 

 humility than in Herbert Spencer's First Principles between 

 the knowable and the unknowable. In future the human 

 race will inevitably less and less seek to frighten itself, or to 

 regulate its conduct, by guessing at mysteries which it knows 

 to be unknowable. We shall continue to guess, and some 

 of us will guess more than others, and more plausibly (Mr. 

 Britling, in the new novel by H. G. Wells, has guessed very 



