philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon
its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of
the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and
supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to
triumph over many kings and civilise many continents. We all agree that
these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we
all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day
is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a
Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,
like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are
symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who
did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been
outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer
race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than
nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single
cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the
elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They
have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have arraigned
theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower than they
have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly and
conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national
limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like
a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this
saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals
of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this
school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr. Watts or
Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was
such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.
Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven