nder scrutiny and condemnation; he must find
reconciliation, harmony, companionship, somehow, somewhere. Hence
the religious man is not arrogant like the pagan, nor proud like the
humanist; he is humble. It is Burke, I think, who says that the whole
ethical life of man has its roots in this humility.[27] The religious
man cannot help but be humble. He has an awful pride in his kinship
with heaven, but, standing before the Lord of heaven, he feels human
nature's proper place, its confusion and division and helplessness;
its dependence upon the higher Power.

[Footnote 27: _Correspondence_, III, p. 213.]

It is at this point that humanism and religion definitely part
company. The former does not feel this absolute and judging Presence,
hence cannot understand the spiritual solicitude of the latter. St.
Paul was not quite at home on Mars Hill; it was hard to make those who
were always hearing and seeing some new thing understand; the shame
and humility of the cross were an unnecessary foolishness to them. So
they have always been. The humanist cannot take seriously this sense
of a transcendent reality. When Cicero, to escape the vengeance of
Clodius, withdrew from Rome, he passed over into Greece and dwelt for
a while in Thessalonica. One day he saw Mount Olympus, the lofty and
eternal home of the deities of ancient Greece. "But I," said the bland
eclectic philosopher, "saw nothing but snow and ice."

How inadequate, then, as a substitute for religion, is even the
noblest humanism. True and fine as far as it goes, it does not go far
enough for us. It takes too little account of the divided life. It
appears not to understand it. On the whole it refuses to acknowledge
that it really exists, or, if it does, it is convinced of man's
unaided ability to efface it. It isn't something inevitable. Hence the
pride which is an essential quality of the humanistic attitude.

But the religious man knows that it does exist and that while he is
not wholly responsible for it, yet he is essentially so and that,
alas, in spite of that fact, he alone cannot bridge it. So he cries,
"Wretched man that I am, what shall I do to be saved?" Here is the
feeling of uneasiness, the sense of something being wrong about us
as we naturally stand, of which James speaks. In that sense of
responsibility is the confession of sin and in the confession of sin
is the acknowledgment of the impotence of the sinner.

"The moving finger writes, and having wr