a work
of rational organization, and can not be had without discipline,
efficiency, and service. But it is for art to surround life with fit
auspices; to create an environment that reflects and forecasts its best
achievements, thus both making a home for it and confirming its
resolves.

Having modelled this moral criticism of art upon the method of Plato, I
shall conclude with his familiar summary of all the wisdom and
eloquence that there is in the matter:

Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true
nature of beauty and grace; then will our youth dwell in the land of
health, amid fair sights {213} and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of
fair works, will visit the eye and ear, like a healthful breeze from a
purer region, and insensibly draw the soul even in childhood into
harmony with the beauty of reason.[21]

{214}

CHAPTER VI

THE MORAL JUSTIFICATION OF RELIGION[1]

It is generally agreed that religion is either the paramount issue or the
most serious obstacle to progress. To its devotees religion is of
overwhelming importance; to unbelievers it is, in the phrasing of Burke,
"superstitious folly, enthusiastical nonsense, and holy tyranny." The
difference between the friends and the enemies of religion may, I think,
be resolved as follows:

Religion recognizes some final arbitration of human destiny; it is a
lively awareness of the fact that, while man proposes, it is only within
certain narrow limits that he can dispose his own plans. His nicest
adjustments and most ardent longings are overruled; he knows that until
he can discount or conciliate that which commands his fortunes his
condition is precarious and miserable. And through his eagerness to save
himself he leaps to conclusions that are uncritical and premature.
Irreligion, on the other hand, flourishes among those who are more snugly
intrenched {215} within the cities of man. It is a product of
civilization. Comfortably housed as he is, and enjoying an artificial
illumination behind drawn blinds, the irreligious man has the heart to
criticise the hasty speculations and abject fear of those who stand
without in the presence of the surrounding darkness. In other words,
religion is perpetually on the exposed side of civilization, sensitive to
the blasts that blow from the surrounding universe; while irreligion is
in the lee of civilization, with enough remove from danger to foster a
refined concern for logic an