As the worlds population as a whole gets smarter, religion dies out as a result. There is a reason the percentage of Christians in this country has been declining over the years. Good reason if you ask me.
"the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists." They may equally desire atonement, harmony, reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total Soul of Things. But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as "Science" now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to an other and a better world. That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources, but its great reflective source in these days, and at all times, has been the contradiction between the phenomena of Nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind Nature there is a spirit whose expression Nature is. What philosophers call natural theology has been one way of appeasing this craving. That poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has been another way. Now suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its facts " hard ; " suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of Nature
either theologically or poetically, and what result can there be but inner discord and contradiction ? Now this inner discord
(merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways. The longing to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare
facts by themselves. Or supplementary facts may be discovered or believed in, which permit the religious reading to go on. And these two ways of relief are the two stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a moment ago, and which w^hat follows will, I trust, make more clear.Starting then with Nature, we naturally tend, if w^e have the religious craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius
, O Universe,
what thou wishest I wish.
Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made heaven and earth, and looking on them saw that they were good. Yet,
on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at
all. Every phenomena that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership ; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful Power
that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a
nightmare view of life, and its peculiar un- heimlichkeit or poisonousness lies expressly in our holding two things together which
cannot possibly agree, in our clinging on the one hand to the demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole, and, on the
other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's adequate manifesta-
tion and expression. It is in the contradiction between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us and with which we oucfht to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as rev^ealed by the visible world's course, that this particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal ''Sartor Resartus" entitled The Everlasting No. " I lived," writes poor Teufelsdrockh, " in a continual indefinite pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what : it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me ; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless Jaws of a devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured." This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy, no man that is irreligious can become its prey. It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the mere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdrockh himself could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this world's experiences very well were he not the victim of an originally unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them piecemeal, with no suspicion of any Whole expressing itself in them, shunning the bitter parts and husband-ing the sweet ones, as the occasion served, and as (to use a vulgar phrase) he struck it fat or lean, he could have zigzagged fairly towards an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of "I don't care," is for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But no! something deep down in Teufelsdrockh and in the rest of us tells US that there is a spirit in things to which we owe allegiance and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood, and so the inner fever and discord also are kept up for Nature taken on her visible surface reveals no such spirit, and beyond the facts of Nature we are at the present stage oi our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
