These two anecdotes are superficially trivial and even comic; but there
is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly
irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey,
and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither
the bogey nor the dilemma having anything to do with religion, or being
serious enough to impose on or confuse any properly educated child
over the age of six. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the
abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. The
result was inevitable. All who were strong-minded enough not to be
terrified by the bogey were left stranded in empty contemptuous
negation, and argued, when they argued at all, as I argued with Father
Addis. But their position was not intellectually comfortable. A member
of parliament expressed their discomfort when, objecting to the
admission of Charles Bradlaugh into parliament, he said 'Hang it all, a
man should believe in something or somebody.' It was easy to throw the
bogey into the dustbin; but none the less the world, our corner of the
universe, did not look like a pure accident: it presented evidences of
design in every direction.
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