religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the
answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like
children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful
assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak,
for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no
reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart
from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical
cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or
unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present
one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to
attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of
religious authority are like men who should attack the police without
ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And
against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race
is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just
as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It
is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is
itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our
thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a
sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should
_anything_ go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good
logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the
brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to