all our usual refined optimisms
and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help
like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help!
help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says
things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as
these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the
complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the
coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and
supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some
constitutions need them too much.

Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally
arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that
takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this
latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it,
healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow.
To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul
seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead
of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and
preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something
almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second
birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again
become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may
have been in the past, the healthy-minded would {160} at present show
themselves the less indulgent party of the two.

In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what
are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say
that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and
that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's
attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid
as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work
far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the
sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against
it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as
melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy
one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as
a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses
positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and th