the healing waters of Christ-like charity, but
despite our gospel he never gets it, never. We give him execration,
injustice; if we let him go with a word, it is never a gentle word, but
a bitter epithet; and we wonder he is estranged, when he sees our
amazing composure in an amazing welter of hypocrisy and deceit. There
is, of course, the better side, the many thousands of Catholics and
Protestants who sincerely aim at better things. But what has to be
admitted is that most sincerely religious people adopt to the man of no
established religion the same attitude as does the hypocrite: they join
in the general cry. They should look to their own houses; they should
purge the temple of the money-lender and the knave; they should see that
their field gives good harvest; they should remember that not to the
atheist only but to the orthodox was it written: "Every tree therefore
that doth not yield good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the
fire."

V

There is a word to be said to the man for whom was invented the curious
name agnostic. I'm concerned only with him who is sincere and
high-minded. Let us pass the flippant critics of things they do not
understand. But all sincere men are comrades in a deep and fine sense.
What the honest unbeliever has to keep in mind is that the darker side
is but one side. If he stands studying a crowd of the orthodox and finds
therein the drunkard, the gambler, the sensualist; and if he says bitter
things of the value of religion and gets in return the clerical fiat of
one who is more a politician than a priest; and if he rejoins
contemptuously, "This is fit for women and children," let him be
reminded that he can also study the other side if he care. If he has the
instinct of a fighter he must know every army has in its trail the
camp-follower and the vulture, but when the battle is set and the danger
is imminent, only the true soldier stands his ground. Because some who
are of poor spirit are in high place, let him not forget the old spirit
still exists. Not only the women but the best intellects of men still
keep the old traditions. Newman and Pascal, Dante and Milton, Erigena
and Aquinas, are all dead, but in our time even they have had followers
not too far off. In the same spirit Gilbert Chesterton found wonder at a
wooden post, and Francis Thompson, in his divine wandering, troubled the
gold gateways of the stars. Let our friend before he frames his final
judgment pause here.