The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take
shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimaeras as the
latter end of the world. Well, I can only say that if you say this,
you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not
disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The absolute
things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly
philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them,
and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more
shallow man.
The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely
enough conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all
its forms deals with a world of PROMISE, while materialism's sun
sets in a sea of disappointment. Remember what I said of the
Absolute: it grants us moral holidays. Any religious view does this.
It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes
our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them. It
paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough, to be sure. The
exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God
insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of
science: we can STUDY our God only by studying his Creation.
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