“Not a paradox at all. What everyone desires most in the world is: to be taken seriously. That is what I want, from you. That is what Oliver wants, from his parents. That is what His Excellency wants, perhaps from someone else. That is what you wanted, I suppose, from His Excellency. But none of us, apparently, is quite willing to perform that great boon for any of the others. God and religion take all men and every man seriously. That is why they have such power of conferring happiness that they could never fall into disrespect if the guttural and vowel and dental which we have just referred to did not, when uttered together, often call into consciousness the obnoxious things which we don’t believe in instead of the desirable things which we do believe in.”
“I don’t quite understand you.”
“Why, I mean that at various times of life and at various ages of the world people get together all the things that they believe necessary and desirable, and then they say that God, meaning all the beneficent power anywhere in the universe, is interested in preserving and forwarding those things.”
“Yes; and then what?”
“And then people acquire a fresh stock of information—about geology and hygiene and economics and slavery and intoxication and sovereignty and war and Asiatics and international relations and so forth. In consequence, they are forced gradually to revise, in the light of their new information, their lists of things which are necessary and desirable. Your son Oliver is busy at just that task now; and he needs a lot of help and sympathy.”
“Oliver is really a dear boy,” said Cornelia, “and I am helping him all I can. We are reading Newman; and I hope by and by to get him to listen to a little of the Imitation, at breakfast.”
“You would do much better,” I said, “to read with him John Morley’s Compromise or Santayana’s Poetry and Religion. Nothing will so decisively check, just now, the growth in him of a religious sense as any attempt to persuade him that the beneficent powers in the universe are pleased with ascetic withdrawals from life, or that they countenance authoritative limitations on the use of the intelligence.”
“But isn’t Morley an atheist?” inquired Cornelia.
I ignored the question, for it was growing dark between the walls of the little valley, and we were entering the deeper darkness of the trees on the domain of Santo Espiritu.
“Oliver,” I said, “is reaching out into the real world, into his own times, and gathering up here and there, without very much high counsel, everything that, as he puts it, sounds good to him. That is going to be the substance of his religion; that will be what he believes in. Whether this collection of his beliefs will acquire for him the compulsion and animating power, the ‘psychological efficacy’ of the religions which possess a great history and a great poetry—that will depend on his imagination and on his susceptibility to high and noble emotions. At present he strikes me as a fairly cool-tempered and slightly cocky young positivist, unconscious that he is building an altar, certainly expecting no fire from heaven to light his sacrifice—rather disdainful, indeed, of all cults which profess that they have come down out of the skies.”