“At any rate,” said one of them to my informant, “if we really are being punished, for goodness’ sake don’t say anything about it or we may be put to other work. You see, we must be doing something, and now we know how to do this, we don’t want the bother of learning something new. You may be right, but we have not got to make our living by it, and what in the name of reason can it matter whether the sieves ever get full or not?”
My traveller reported much the same with regard to the eternal happiness on Mount Olympus. Hercules found Hebe a fool and could never get her off his everlasting knee. He would have sold his soul to find another Ægisthus.
So Jove saw all this and it set him thinking.
“It seems to me,” said he, “that Olympus and Hades are both failures.”
Then he summoned a council and the whole matter was thoroughly discussed. In the end Jove abdicated, and the gods came down from Olympus and assumed mortality. They had some years of very enjoyable Bohemian existence going about as a company of strolling players at French and Belgian town fairs; after which they died in the usual way, having discovered at last that it does not matter how high up or how low down you are, that happiness and misery are not absolute but depend on the direction in which you are tending and consist in a progression towards better or worse, and that pleasure, like pain and like everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment.
XXII
Reconciliation
Religion
By religion I mean a living sense that man proposes and God disposes, that we must watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, that he who thinketh he standeth must take heed lest he fall, and the countless other like elementary maxims which a man must hold as he holds life itself if he is to be a man at all.
If religion, then, is to be formulated and made tangible to the people, it can only be by means of symbols, counters and analogies, more or less misleading, for no man professes to have got to the root of the matter and to have seen the eternal underlying verity face to face—and even though he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols—by the help of something not more actually true than a child’s doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt gratifies and stimulates the motherly instinct in the child.
Therefore we ought not to cavil at the visible superstition and absurdity of much on which religion is made to rest, for the unknown can never be satisfactorily rendered into the known. To get the known from the unknown is to get something out of nothing, a thing which, though it is being done daily in every fraction of every second everywhere, is logically impossible of conception, and we can only think by logic, for what is not in logic is not in thought. So that the attempt to symbolise the unknown is certain to involve inconsistencies and absurdities of all kinds and it is childish to complain of their existence unless one is prepared to advocate the stifling of all religious sentiment, and this is like trying to stifle hunger or thirst. To be at all is to be religious more or less. There never was any man who did not feel that behind this world and above it and about it there is an unseen world greater and more incomprehensible than anything he can conceive, and this feeling, so profound and so universal, needs expression. If expressed it can only be so by the help of inconsistencies and errors. These, then, are not to be ordered impatiently out of court; they have grown up as the best guesses at truth that could be made at any given time, but they must become more or less obsolete as our knowledge of truth is enlarged. Things become known which were formerly unknown and, though this brings us no nearer to ultimate universal truth, yet it shows us that many of our guesses were wrong. Everything that catches on to realism and naturalism as much as Christianity does must be affected by any profound modification in our views of realism and naturalism.