amations of the intellect bent on
showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we
feel--quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat
ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are
actually able to perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our
innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should
succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away
their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness,
either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual
value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments
which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental
acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his
temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness
is merely a matter of overinstigated nerves. William's melancholy
about the universe is due to bad digestion--probably his liver is
torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical
constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would
take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed
example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common
nowadays among certain writers, of criticizing the religious emotions
by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion
is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and
the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental
instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun,
starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a
more earthly object of affection. And the like.[1]

[1] As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this
notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself
only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions
are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as
perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed,
of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best
understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther's wish to
marry a nun:--the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes,
and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast