on
not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never
been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis,
they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority
has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as
every legal system (and especially our present one) has been
callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack
the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious
authority are like men who should attack the police without ever
having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.
And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier,
if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert
that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are
merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?
Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?
They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."
But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right
to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought
that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which
all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of
decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its
ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called
"Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself,
and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions,
past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin
that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked
and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hie