It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of
a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had
it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of
the genus 'lost-soul' whom God throws as a sop to the eternal
fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest.
What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful
substance even hell-fire does not warm.
And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist
philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The
optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the
fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in
practical life perfection is something far off and still in process
of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the
finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection
eternally complete.
I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow
optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that
valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism
goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I
sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize
heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now
in vogue.
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