en that I were so much clay,
As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling."

Ah me! So at many times would most of us. And in that sense that we
are not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning.

Here is the sense of the gap between man and the natural world felt
because man has no power over it. He cannot swerve nor modify its
laws, nor do his laws acknowledge its ascendency over them. But
what makes the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moral
difference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating being and all
this unheeding world about him. Whatever it is that looks out from the
windows of our eyes something not merely of wonder and desire but also
of fear and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as well
as so alien an environment. For a moral being to glorify nature as
such is pure folly or sheer sentimentality. For he knows that her
apparent repose and beauty is built up on the ruthless and unending
warfare of matched forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium of
pain. He knows, too, that that in him which allies him with
this natural world is his baser, not his better part. This nobly
pessimistic attitude toward the natural universe and toward man so far
as he shares in its characteristics, is found in all classic systems
of theology and has dominated the greater part of Christian
thinking. If it is ignored today by the pseudo-religionists and
the sentimentalists; it is clearly enough perceived by contemporary
science and contemporary art. The biologist understands it. "I know of
no study," wrote Thomas Huxley, "which is so unutterably saddening
as that of the evolution of humanity as set forth in the annals of
history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the
marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more
intelligent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which as
often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions
which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his
physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree
of comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life in
such favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt,
and then, for thousands and thousands of years struggles with various
fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed and misery, to
maintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of his
fellow men. He