Then there is "the Fourth Gospel": your Pedant never calls it the Gospel of S. John, as his fathers have done before him for two thousand years. He must give it a pretentious name and then, because it happens to be cram-full of Christian doctrine, he must deny its authenticity. There is not a vestige of proof against that authenticity, nor for that matter a vestige of sound historical proof in favour of it. Like everything else in the fundamental structure of the Faith from the Mass to the Apocalypse, it has for witness the tradition of the Church, and is no more acceptable as an historic document of the type of the "Agricola" or the "Catiline Orations" than any one of the other Gospels. There is not an event mentioned in the whole of the New Testament which has true historic value. The whole thing depends upon Belief, and Belief in a corporate teaching body. Yet how your Pedant has flourished upon this same Fourth Gospel! Now he is "reverently accepting it," now "reluctantly rejecting it"; he fondles it as a cat does a mouse, and when you try to come to handgrips with him he will first (taking you for a simple and unlearned man) put you off with silly technicalities. You have but to read up the meaning of these technicalities in the dictionary to find that he is talking through his hat. He has no evidence, and there can be no evidence, as to whether the Gospel was or was not written by the traditional figure which the Catholic Church calls S. John, and all he has to say on the matter would not tempt the most gullible gambler to invest a penny on a ten-to-one chance.
Then there is "the conflict between religion and science." What the Pedant really means when he uses that phrase (and he has not only used it threadbare but has fed it by the ton to the recently enfranchised and to the vulgar in general) is the conflict between a mystical doctrine and every-day common sense. That conflict has always existed and always will exist. If you say to any man who has not heard of such a thing before "I will kill you and yet you will survive" or "This water is not ordinary water, it does more than wash you or assuage your thirst, it will also cure blindness, and make whole a diseased limb," the man who has not heard such things before, will call you a liar; of course he will, and small blame to him. We can only generalise from repeated experience, and oddities and transcendental things are not within the field of repeated experience. But "science" has nothing to do with that. The very fact that they use the word religion is enough to show the deplorable insufficiency of their minds. What religion? Your Pedant is far too warped and hypocritical to say exactly what he means even in so simple a case; so he uses the word "religion," a term which may apply to Thugs with their doctrine of the sanctity of murder, or to the Mahommedans who are not bound to any transcendental doctrine but only to a Rule of Life, or to Buddhists who have but a philosophy, or to Plymouth Brethren, or to Head Hunters.
I said at the beginning of this that the Pedant was food for laughter, rather than for anger.
Humph!
III ON ATHEISM
The Atheist is he that has forgotten God. He that denies God may do so in many innocent ways, and is an Atheist in form, but is not condemnable as such. Thus one man will reason by contradiction that there can be no God. If there were a God (says he), how could such things be? This man has not read or does not know sufficient to his purpose, or is not wide enough. His purpose is Truth, so he is not to be condemned. Another will say, "There is no God," meaning, "There is none that I have heard called God": as, the figure of an old man; some vengeful spirit; an absurdity taught him by fools; and so forth. Another also will say, "There is no God," as he would say, "Thus do I solve this riddle!" He has played a game, coming to a conclusion of logic, and supposes himself right by the rules of the game. Nor is he more to be condemned than one who shall prove, not that God is not, but that God is, by similar ways. For though this last man proves truth, and that first man falsehood, yet each is only concerned with proving, and not with making good or standing up for the Truth, so that it shall be established. Neither would found in the mind something unshakeable, but each would rather bring a process to its conclusion for neatness.
We call that man Atheist who, thinking or unthinking, waking or sleeping, knows not God; and when it is brought to him that either God is not or is, would act as though the question mattered nothing. Such an Atheist makes nothing of God's judgments nor of his commands. He does not despise them but will have them absent, as he will have God absent also. Nor is he a rebel but rather an absconder.
Of Atheism you may see that it is proper to a society and not to a man, so that Atheists are proper to an Atheist Commonwealth, and this because we find God in mankind or lose him there.