“Repent of what?”
“Oh, of being worldly, you might call it.”
“Please postpone that till you are ninety. You mustn’t repent yet. Do you know, I used to think scornfully of deathbed repentances, but now I think I was wrong; a deathbed is the place for repentance; and the Catholic Church and the Gospels are right in welcoming those who turn up at the eleventh hour. In fact, I half suspect—if we were put into the world to see what we can make of it, and I don’t know any other good reason for our presence here—I half suspect that God Himself admires most those who ‘surrender’ to Him only with their last breath.”
“How perfectly shocking!” exclaimed Cornelia. “What can you mean by such absurdity?”
“By surrendering, I mean throwing yourself on God before you have exhausted every possibility of making sense out of the world for yourself. Perhaps there will come a time for you and for me when there will be wisdom in such a surrender. But for young people, and for people at our time of life, too, there is, there ought to be, something repugnant in losing one’s intellectual grip, in letting go, in abandoning the effort to find right relations with realities, in giving up the attempt to make a little cosmos out of the chaotic materials at hand. To my mind, it is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost to desert that fine heartbreaking task in order to take refuge in a mood of mystical ‘peace without victory,’ peace without substance. Your son would smile at my use of religious phraseology and ‘mythological bunk.’ But he would understand, I think,—with a little explanation, anyway,—precisely what I mean by not surrendering to God till the last breath.”
“The children’s ideas of religion at present,” said Cornelia, “are simply heathenish. Will you believe what Oliver said to Mr. Blakewell the other day? He said something like this: ‘God? What is God? God is a short word composed of three sounds: a guttural, a vowel, and a dental!’”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I ventured.
“I’m sure I don’t know. But just imagine a boy of nineteen saying a thing like that! No wonder everyone is dismayed at the disappearance of religion among the younger generation.”
“My dear Cornelia,” I replied, “religion itself, as some one has said, is one of the most lovable things in the world. The word sometimes becomes obnoxious and is avoided by young people; the thing itself doesn’t disappear. The word ‘God’ is a symbol for one of the great ideas in the world. The word sometimes acquires obnoxious associations; but young people do not lose interest in the idea which it represents. God and religion are, and always will be, popular, in the best sense, because they come, offering to do for young and old what old and young desire above everything else should be done for them.”
“Well? What horrid paradox next?”