humility made a man doubtful about his
efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a
man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working
altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and
blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across
somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of
course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on
the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in
the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who
doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of
old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be
convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are
too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this
intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:
that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his
reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the authority of
reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs
defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower
already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of
religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the
answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like
children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful
assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak,
for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no
reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart
from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical
cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or
unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present
one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to
attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of
religious authority are like men who should attack the police without
ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And
against it something certainly must be reared as a barri