is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly
irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey,
and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither
the bogey nor the dilemma having anything to do with religion, or being
serious enough to impose on or confuse any properly educated child
over the age of six. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the
abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. The
result was inevitable. All who were strong-minded enough not to be
terrified by the bogey were left stranded in empty contemptuous
negation, and argued, when they argued at all, as I argued with Father
Addis. But their position was not intellectually comfortable. A member
of parliament expressed their discomfort when, objecting to the
admission of Charles Bradlaugh into parliament, he said 'Hang it all, a
man should believe in something or somebody.' It was easy to throw the
bogey into the dustbin; but none the less the world, our corner of the
universe, did not look like a pure accident: it presented evidences of
design in every direction. There was mind and purpose behind it. As the
anti-Bradlaugh member would have put it, there must be somebody behind
the something: no atheist could get over that.


PALEY'S WATCH

Paley had put the argument in an apparently unanswerable form. If you
found a watch, full of mechanism exquisitely adapted to produce a series
of operations all leading to the fulfilment of one central purpose of
measuring for mankind the march of the day and night, could you believe
that it was not the work of a cunning artificer who had designed and
contrived it all to that end? And here was a far more wonderful thing
than a watch, a man with all his organs ingeniously contrived, cords and