tle more closely. Why
should persons--even if ignorant--have the bias which some obviously
present against the idea of a God? Why should they wish to think that
there is no such Being, no future existence, nothing higher than Nature?
Some persons maintain that precedent to a denial of God there must be a
moral failure. That I am sure is quite wrong. I should be far from
saying that in some materialists there is not a considerable weakening
of moral fibre, or perhaps it would be better put, a distortion of moral
vision, as evidenced by many of the statements and proposals of
eugenists, for example, and by the political nostrums of some who wrest
science to a purpose for which it was not intended. This no doubt is
true, but it is not quite the argument with which I am now dealing, and
that argument, if it implies moral failure in the persons concerned, has
little if any genuine foundation in fact. Mr. Devas, in that very
remarkable book, _The Key to the World's Progress_, gives us the useful
phrase "post-Christians." These people are really pagans living in the
Christian era, retaining many of the excellent qualities which they owe
neither to Nature nor to paganism, but to the inheritance--perhaps
involuntary and unrecognised--of the influences of Christianity. Many of
these people are kind, benevolent, scrupulously moral. They have not
learned to be such from Nature, for Nature teaches no such lessons. Nor
have they learnt them from paganism, for these are not pagan virtues.
They are an inheritance from Christianity. Those, therefore, who build
arguments as to the needlessness of religion on the foundation that
persons without any belief in God do exhibit all the moral virtues,
build on sand. At any rate the answer to the question which we are
discussing is not to be found in this direction.

Others again will perhaps maintain the thesis that fashion has a great
deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at
least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic;
perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there
is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with
the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly as
there are tides in the fashion of dress. There was a Weismann tide, now
nearly at dead water; there was an anti-vitalistic tide, now ebbing
fast. When these were in full flow it was a hazardous thing for a young
m