martially trained, like a super-state, to oppose everything not
included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of
utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to
God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world,
a sublime accident."

Certainly the will to "return to God", if not an accident, is an incident
in the life of the world; and the whole world itself is a sublime
accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and
precarious. Yet so long as the imperial God continues successfully to keep
our world going, it will be no accident, but a natural necessity, that
many a mind should turn to the thought of the infinite with awe, with a
sense of liberation, and even with joy. The infinite God owes all his
worshippers, little as he may care for them, to the success of the
imperial God in creating reflective and speculative minds. Or (to drop
these mythological expressions which may become tiresome) philosophers owe
to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look
beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may _look_ beyond, and
take comfort in the vision, they cannot _pass_ beyond. As M. Benda says,
the most faithful Levite can return to the infinite only in his thought;
in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be