The Sense of the Supernatural

My cousin George is beginning to obsess me, as the mediaeval theologians say. Pie has paid me another visit, and the aroma of his personality still lingers about my room.

I have allowed him to see portions of my previous remarks upon him; and since he is entirely good-humoured, he professed himself flattered rather than annoyed. "My dear fellow," he said, "it is very good of you to be so much interested. It's quite true; I have never had any religious sense that I can remember. It seems to me that I get on all right without it; and as for dreariness — well, it seems to me that a fool's paradise is considerably more dreary than the pleasant little town in which you have placed me. That at any rate exists; even you allow that. The other does not, at least I do not allow that it does, and you cannot prove it.... For God's sake, let's talk about something else!"

Now, what is to be made of this phenomenon? Is one bound to confess then, after all, that the religious sense is like a taste for music or a fancy for travel; and that men may fulfil the purpose of their existence equally well, lacking it.''...

Let me expand the thesis, and in doing so, reassure myself.

A sense of music or a taste for travel are facts to be accounted for: it is perfectly true that many persons appear to exist in comfort without them; but it is another question as to how far the world without them could exist at all.

America, for example, would still be represented on our maps by leagues of barren water if Columbus had not been inspired with a divine frenzy. St. James's Hall would never have raised its head in Piccadilly, nor the opera-house stood in

Bayreuth, if Beethoven and Wagner had not been moved })y an impulse, that not even they themselves could exj)lain, to scribble dots and dashes on and between five lines arranged like a hurdle. The world would have been a poorer place without these inexplicable emotions which hardheaded persons may denounce as secretions of the liver, but which yet have crossed seas, climbed mountains, discovered inspiration in the crash of brass, melted lovers' hearts by a contact of a horse's mane and the clockwork of a cat, wakened the dead to life, and set the world a-singing.

Or consider again those qualities which all men approve and by which all profit, and yet which none can justify. Such things as chivalry, or the conquest of the strong by the weak; self-sacrifice, which only becomes sublime when the certain is immolated for the sake of the uncertain, or the greater for the less, or the known for the unknown, as when a mature mother rejoices to die for an impossible child — these things can be defended by no argumerits which George is capable of adducing. On the contrary, they can be mercilessly condemned by the code to which he is so fond of appealing. The Survival-of-theFittest, the Struggle-for-Existence, stride down on them like giant slayers; but I have yet to meet the materialist who, when the crisis was imminent, would not intervene in this massacre of the innocents.

Religious Emotion, then, is content to take her stand by these illogical sisters of hers, and wait radiantly for the world's acquittal. "See what I have done for you," she cries with confident eyes and glowing cheeks. "Have I not, also, crossed seas, rescued captives, climbed high hills, haled you to Paradise, hung with you over the red mouth of hell, called you hither and thither, and shown you things to come? Have I not saved you from crime when reason urged you on, lighted the lamps when sense had put them out, strengthened weak knees, and made the lame to leap; opened blind eyes and deaf ears, painted the dull world with glory? And if these are too flimsy proofs by wliicli to justify myself, — have I not laboured in quarries, and retranslated them into arch and pinnacle and fretted spire? Have I not walled off sweet houses of peace when all men were at war? Have I not tuned vour fiddles, blown your organs, sung through human throats, set dead words alight, and lifted you in spite of yourself and death and hell and adverse circumstance? Have I not walked with you as children, held your hands in dangerous paths, comforted you with better gifts than health or wealth, whispered secrets to you when you lay dying? Then, can you not be content to suffer me to exist, even if you do not know my birth or origin? Is it not enough that I came to you through the door of your heart, and that my friends are Art and Chivalry — such friends that we live and die together, for if you slay me you will find them dead by my side."

This then seems to be her answer to the jeer that religion cannnot be proved. Certainly it cannot, at least in the sense of an exact science; but neither can nine tenths of what we take for granted. I cannot prove the beauty of a Gloire-deDijon, or the honesty of my friend, or the pleasure of incipient drunkenness; yet I do not for that reason disregard them as merely subjective impressions, true for me but doubtful for another. On the contrary, I walk into my garden to enjoy myself; I lend John five pounds; I refrain from more than two glasses of beer; — with complete confidence that my motives are, if not reasonable, at least emotional, and not in the least to be less depended upon for that account.

Or consider it from another point of view.

The dulness of irreligious people is a fact beyond question: they yawn in one another's company. I am perfectly prepared therefore to advance to meet them, and declare that their philosophy is too dull to be true.

Their answer is that the philosophy which I represent is too good to be true; the world would be too lively to liold together if miracles and conversions and such things were any more than agreeable illusions. And to that again I answer by an analogy which they are bound to respect.

I tell them, out of their own mouth, that phenomena of unassisted nature are only uninteresting to those who are too blind to see. A dust-heap, for example, or a stretch of sand, or a slope of grass, is dull only to the eyes of unperceptive persons. Dulness, then, is not a fact but an illusion; it lies in the brain, not in the object perceived. There is simply no limit to the range of interest which lies at the feet of every man. The telescope or the microscope do no more than take him a step further along the road of the infinite. Fact is not onlv stranojer than fiction, it is far larger as well. They must allow me, then, to apply that canon to matters perceived by the religious sense. These are ranges of thought, they tell me, that are not worth a sensible man's examination. I answer that first, in their own words, the "proper study of mankind is man"; and therefore that to dismiss so enormous a weight of what claims to be actual experience, as inconsiderable, is to confess to limitation and sectarianism: secondly, that since, as again they confess, truth is both larger and stranger than fiction, it is beyond man's capacity to imagine in excess of fact — he may picture God as a family on Olympus, but he cannot attain to His infinity; he may believe in witchcraft, but he cannot fathom the abyss of spiritual malevolence that surrounds him. The fact, then, that we can imagine a Saviour indicates that there must be one greater than our dreams; that we picture the streets of the Heavenly City as paved with gold, shows us that they are paved with something much better; the crowns of light to which we aspire must be set with jewels, whose splendour we have never seen, and be wrought in a workshop of inconceivable glory. In other words, "Eye hath not seen..." and the rest of the quotation.

Yes, George, this is rank idealism expressed in frothy rhetorie. But remember that those two things have between them done more to make the world (which you find so excellent) what it is, than all you and your friends, and steamships, and Stock Exchanges, and Societies for the Propagation of Sound Thinking, would have done in twice the time. You yourself, for example, would not have existed if your father had not thought your mother to be what she was not, and grossly exaggerated what they both knew to be the truth; and no steamship would have been permitted to make foul our rivers and glad the hearts of our merchants, if Stephenson, or somebody else, had not dreamed that perhaps there was more in the kettle than water.

It would seem, then, that while individuals manage to exist without a taste for art, travel, or religion; yet that, first, as a matter of fact, half their life, and that the only half worth living, is generated from the products of these things, as well as two thirds more of what is left in the realm of the purely material. Remove the instincts of art, exploration, and religion from the world, and you are confronted by a set of pigs, dwelling, at the very best, in mud houses, covered with hair, ignorant of what lies at the other side of the nearest tree, doing nothing whatever but eating, drinking, breathing, and begetting children in their own likeness for which — (and no wonder)

— they have little affection and no hope.... What, then, is to be said for people like my second cousin?

There is a great deal to be said against them; they are barbaric instead of cultivated, stupid instead of clever; and — which they would resent being told more than anything else, — retrograde instead of progressive. What few advantages they have

— not over the rest of the world, but over their savage ancestors — have accrued to them through the enveloping atmosphere of their friends and a certain strain of heredity. They have received treasures of experience by their birth and circumstances; and though they are squandering these as rapidly rilE SUPERNATURAL SENSE (v:> as possible, yet there are a few dingy coins still in their dusty cupboards which are sufficient, for the present, to ensure them a right of entry into decent society and a claim on the necessaries of life. My cousin would have had neither clothes to wear nor words in w hicli to express his few and sterile thoughts if his ancestors had not been artists enough to understand that drapery was more elegant than blue woad, and their Roman invaders, murderers, and civilizers had not been mad enough to think that a journey in a painted boat was more romantic than the perpetual eating of olives in a villa: and it is obvious that if George had presented himself at my front door, naked, howling, and with a flint-hatchet, I should have been compelled to tell my maid that I was gone out to see a man.

Even if he had gained admittance I should not have understood him; nor he me. Yet when he actually came we were both moderately intelligible by one another, because he has somehow pilfered the use and meaning of a religious vocabulary that he professes to despise. When he spoke of "Hfe being very pleasant in this Httle place," he explicitly recognized, first, the difference between life and death, and therefore implicitly the existence of Heaven and Hell; second, the presence in man of an appreciative faculty whose roots spring from his immortal soul; third, the laws of space which lead us by an almost direct route to the relations between spirit and matter, the immanence and transcendency of God, and even to the central mystery of the Christian revelation. He confessed, too, his indebtedness to scholastic grammarians, since he guided his speech more or less according to their injunctions; he bore witness, by the use of his fourth word, to the Norman invasion, itself undertaken under the Church's blessing and sanction; in fact, he showed himself to be the submissive heir of the Christian ages, instead of, as he fondly imagines, their dispassionate subverter.

Yet there is even more to be said for him than these pleas which he would so fiercely reject, if he knew that I was putting them forward on his behalf.

AVhen 1 ask myself why he did not strangle me as I stooped to poke the fire, I am bound to answer that 1 do not believe that he was restrained solely by his fear of the police. I think George to be a tolerably moral man. This of course, too, he would repudiate: the word "unmoral" is for ever on his lips: yet he leads a life that would put to shame a Christian baron of the Middle Ages. I am aware that he preaches the gospel of the fatherly cynic as he sits over his fire sometimes, with an impressionable young man; but like many other preachers, he would not even dream of practising the code which he proclaims.

I am forced, therefore, to the conclusion that the religious spirit dominates not only his vocabulary, his methods of thought, and his behaviour, but even the mind that underlies them and makes them what tliev are. In other words, he is a profoundly religious man.

He confesses in his life the existence of a code on which he can offer no remarKs worth hearing; and he perpetually gives the lie to his dictum that sin lies not in action but excess.

He avails himself thankfully of the innumerable advantages which the faith, hope, and love of his friends and ancestors provide so kindly for his support, though he refuses to acknowledge their source. He lies, like a child at his mother's breast, drinking the sweetness that he does not understand and the strength which makes him what he is: he guides his life by principles too bright for his enfeebled eyes to look upon. I hold, then, that mystically and effectually he grasps God, though he denies, so far as his starved and poisoned consciousness is concerned, that there is any such Person. Yet, when all is said, what he thinks of God, however, is not an important consideration; but what God thinks of him — and I have tried to show reason for believing that this is not altogether unfavourably — this is what matters.