construct a religion is a
license given them by reason to admit the proposition that the
individual will is free. The primary obstacle to religious belief to-day
is the difficulty of finding in this universe a rational place for
freedom--a "_voluntas avolsa fatis_." How is this obstacle to be
surmounted?

To this question I attempted an answer in a new philosophical book,
_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, of which the general contention is as
follows. If we trust solely to science and objective evidence, the
difficulty in question is insuperable. There is no place for individual
freedom in the universe, and apologists who attempt to find one are no
better than clowns tumbling in the dust of a circus. If they try to
smuggle it in through some chink in the _moenia mundi_, these ageless
walls are impregnable, or if here and there some semblance of a gate
presents itself, each gate is guarded, like Eden, by science with its
flaming swords.

The argument of this book, then, is in the main negative. But in dealing
with the problem thus it is not negative in its tendency, for it carries
the reader to the verge of the only possible solution. For pure reason,
as enlightened by modern knowledge, human freedom is unthinkable, and
yet for any religion by which the pure reason and the practical reason
can be satisfied the first necessity is that men should accept such
freedom as a fact. But this argument does not apply to the belief in
human freedom only. It applies to all the primary conceptions which men
assume, and are bound to assume, in order to make life practicable. If
we follow pure reason far enough--if we follow it as far as it will
go--not only freedom is unthinkable, but so are other things as well.
Space is unthinkable, time is unthinkable, and so (as Herbert Spencer
elaborately argued) is motion. In each of these is involved some
self-contradiction, some gap which reason cannot span; and yet, as Kant
said, unless we do assume them, rational action, and even thought
itself, are impossible. If the difficulty, then, of conceiving human
freedom is the only difficulty which religious belief encounters, we may
trust that in time such belief will reassert itself, and a definite
religion of some sort acquire new life along with it.

But religion does not logically depend on the postulate of freedom
alone. Moral freedom, in a religious sense, requires, not the postulate
of individual freedom only, but also of a Supreme or C