"logical" experts, have been condemned as
unadulterated folly? Such a sanhedrim is always in session within a
man, and the hero has much ado to stand up to its decrees.

Religion is a power which develops the hero in the man at the expense
of the coward in the man. As the change proceeds there comes a moment
when the cowardly method of reasoning, with its eye on safety, ceases
to dominate the soul. At the same moment the heroic element awakes and
looks with longing towards the dangerous mountain-tops. Thenceforward
the man's reason becomes the organ of the new spirit that is in him, no
longer fettered to the self-centre, but mounting up with wings as an
eagle. His powers as a reasoner are enriched, his survey of the facts
more comprehensive, his insight into their significance more
penetrating.

Religion has sometimes been represented as introducing a new faculty
called "faith" into the man's life, as adding this faith to the reason
he had before, or perhaps as driving reason out and putting faith in
its place. This is a misconception. Faith is neither a substitute for
reason nor an addition to it. Faith is nothing else than reason grown
courageous--reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its widest
vision. Its advent marks the point where the hero within the man is
getting the better of the coward, where safety, as the prime object of
life, is losing its charm and another Object, hazardous but beautiful,
dimly seen but deeply loved, has begun to tempt the awakened soul.

Another way of saying the same thing is to name religion the "new
birth" of the soul. But a new birth which, while changing all the rest
of the man, left his reason unchanged, which turned all the rest of him
into a hero, but kept him still reasoning with a coward's logic, would
not amount to very much. Unless I am mistaken the new birth must begin
in the seat of reason if it is to begin at all. Is not the man's
reason the very essence of the man? How then, can he be converted at
all unless he is converted there?

Most of the "defences of religion" that I am acquainted with ignore all
this. They claim to address themselves to reason. And so indeed they
do, but to reason in a low stage of its development, to the half-born
reason of the timid and unemancipated soul, to the unheroic side of
human nature, treating us as beings whose ultimate interest is to save
our own skins, and making use of the logic, admirable on its own fi