One of the central themes of our horrific century, now drawing to a merciful close, has been the attempt of many powerful and highly intelligent people to find a substitute for God as the focus and directing principle of their lives. Numerous such efforts have been made. All have ended in fearsome or pathetic failure. Man is a complex and audacious creature, capable of almost any enterprise and constantly increasing his range of knowledge. He is also a mysterious creature, which all the developing resources of psychology have failed to penetrate, except superficially. But the one certain fact about him is that he is mortal. And it is on this vital, or rather terminal, point that the attempted substitutes for God offer least comfort.
Human reactions to the notion of God are complicated and often contradictory. Most of us recognize we need God, especially at certain times. Recently, during the fighting to liberate Kuwait, a U.S. Marine sergeant remarked simply: “Among Marines in their foxholes waiting to go into action, there are no atheists.” Who, in a fierce storm at sea, is an agnostic? But there is also a Promethean spirit in man, proud of man’s progress and seemingly limitless capacities, unwilling to submit to the total subordination which the notion of God demands, driven first to resistance, then to the denial that God exists at all. This Promethean spirit has been growing with dramatic speed over the last 250 years. It is presented as the spirit of modernity, the creed of rationalism, the march of science. It preaches the absurdity of belief in God, the fatuity of religious doctrine and the positive evil of much of the teachings and practices of the organized faiths. In the Western world today, perhaps a majority of the people who classify themselves as educated—that is, they have attended university, they read books regularly and regard themselves as people who think seriously about the problems of the day and the nature of life—perhaps a majority, would range themselves in the Promethean camp, with varying degrees of consciousness and enthusiasm. Skepticism or denial of God is the hallmark of modern Homo sapiens—Thinking Man.
However, one of the advantages of being a historian is that one is constantly obliged to refer to the data, to what precisely happened and what people actually said. The record of the Promethean faction, judging by their utterances, is no more impressive than that of the more benighted and obscurantist clergy through the ages. Here, taken almost at random, are some of them. In 1764, by which time the Promethean movement had really got going, Voltaire wrote: “Theological religion is the enemy of mankind.” Not an enemy, no, but the enemy. One can think of many enemies of mankind today—many more than in Monsieur Voltaire’s time, I fear—but no one in his sense would put “theological religion” high on his list. Or again, here is Winwood Reade, whose powerful tract The Martyrdom of Man was the atheist’s bible in the late nineteenth century: “The destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of civilisation.” Note again the note of extremism: not “desirable” but “essential.” Well, our poor civilization, or what is left of it, seems much more fragile than in Reade’s fortunate lifetime, and were he to return to earth today I do not think he would find a solitary soul, agnostic, atheist, or anyone else, who would agree that the destruction of Christianity is essential to keep civilization going. Quite the reverse. The vast majority see it as a prop, however feeble.
Other central propositions of the Promethean faction seem equally ridiculous with the passage of time. Ernest Renan was foolish enough to write: “History proves beyond possibility of contradiction that Christianity is not a supernatural fact.” Poor Renan! So plausible and sure of himself in his day, now no more convincing than Bishop Usher, who worked out the exact day and year the world began. Actually, Renan, by the standards of most nineteenth-century anti-religious intellectuals, survives comparatively well. The ones who appear most absurd are precisely those who tried to apply the principles of contemporary science—the frontiers of knowledge—to explain the world in non-religious terms. Littre defined the soul as “anatomically the sum of functions of the neck and spinal column, physiologically the sum of functions of the power of perception in the brain.” Not exactly very helpful, is it? Haeckel, by contrast, wrote, “We now know that the soul is a sum of plasma-movements in the ganglion cells.” Professor Tyndall thought “all life was once latent in a fiery cloud.” Taine stated: “Man is a spiritual automaton . . .  Vice and virtue are products like sugar and vitriol.” Late nineteenth-century atheists were particularly positive though contradictory, on the process of thought. Professor Huxley believed “The thoughts I am uttering are the expression of molecular changes in my body.” Karl Vogt laid down: “Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver or urine from the kidneys.” Jacob Moleshott was even more certain: “No thought [can emerge] without phosphorus.”
The twentieth-century Prometheans do not survive with much more credit, and their obiter dicta are already acquiring the same fusty whiff of absurdity. H.G. Wells, world-famous in his day, not least in America, was a marvelous writer of science fiction but it is now almost impossible to point to a single pronouncement of his on society in his own day which carries the ring of truth or even mere plausibility. He ended his life in 1945 in despair, having painted a strange mural on the walls of his house in Hanover Terrace of horned devils and an image of Man, accompanied by the slogan: “Time to Go.”
Bertrand Russell, whom I knew, and of whom I have recently published a study in my book Intellectuals, was perhaps the leading evangelist of anti-God rationalism of the century. But it is hard to find a subject—and he wrote on most subjects, including those of the highest importance—on which he did not change his mind fundamentally, often more than once—and usually without explanation or apology; indeed his rule was to deny that any change of position had taken place. His immense output, supposedly offering an alternative philosophy of life and morals to one based on belief in God, thus leaves the reader who struggles through it—and there cannot be many these days—with an impression of total confusion. The truth is, Russell could not devise a Promethean alternative to God which convinced even himself for more than a few years; his secular faith was in a state of constant osmosis like that of Auguste Comte, who occupied the same position of intellectual eminence in the mid-19th century as Russell did in the twentieth, and is now simply a joke, if a pathetic one.
Russell’s most passionate disciple was the late Sir A.J. Ayer, an engaging man, like Russell a tremendous egoist and an unconsciously comic figure, in whose company I delighted. We used to meet at the Beefsteak Club, where I enjoyed teasing him. “Freddie, I suppose it would be a correct statement to say you are the most intelligent man in Britain”—”Oh, no, no, no, my dear fellow,” he would begin modestly, “don’t be so absurd.” Then, intellectual rigor and his love of truth would assert themselves. “Well, if one looks at the statement seriously—if one considers— if, in short, one wishes to be strictly honest, I suppose—indeed I must—conclude you are right; you are, in fact, absolutely right!” My other tease was to threaten to visit him on his death-bed, accompanied by a Jesuit of powerful intellect, who would convert him to Roman Catholicism at the eleventh hour. I soon realized this genuinely frightened him, so I dropped it. In fact, Ayer’s end was a bit mysterious, because he had a physical experience which convinced him he had died and come to life again, and his final writings on the subject are so unclear to me that I am not sure whether he met his God in a state of disbelief, belief, or genuine doubt. At all events, as with Russell himself, there was evidence of instability and confusion in Ayer’s thought.
A third leading Promethean I knew, Jean-Paul Sartre, died I think in a state of disbelief but his life and writings are no better an advertisement for the secular, humanistic, alternative to religious belief than Russell’s. Sartre was not a bad fellow in some ways; he was, for instance, one of the very few left-wing intellectuals I have ever met—and I have met hundreds—who was really generous about money. But the heroic secular morality he preached, derived largely from Heidegger and christened by the media Existentialism, was belied by the extraordinary squalor, selfishness, confusion, cruelty, and not least cowardice of his own life. His final years, in fact, were horrific. Moreover, there was in his writings—his output, like Russell’s, was enormous—a degree not so much of inconsistency, though there was certainly that too, as of incoherence, so that in the end one was not clear what, if anything, he did believe, and what, if anything he advised humanity to do. Sartre bewildered even his intellectual followers, who were once numerous. What then had he, classified in his heyday in the late 1940s as the world’s leading philosopher, to offer to the great mass of ordinary people? Nothing whatever. Yet if there is to be a true secular, humanist alternative to God, it must speak clearly to the masses, as Christianity has always done.
Humanism in our time has been a dismaying failure, and my impression is that, at any rate as a substantial body of thought, it is in rapid and irreversible decline. Indeed, it is interesting to note that, in Europe, membership of organized atheist and humanist societies, as a proportion of the population, reached its peak in the 1880s, at roughly the same time as the maximum percentage of those regularly attending church. But while Christianity has survived, and in many places flourishes and renews itself, no one could now conceivably believe that humanism is the spiritual force of the future, or indeed anything at all except a faint impress in the minds of a tiny and diminishing minority.
A more interesting and difficult question is the degree of harm it has done, particularly in our century. I believe that the political teachings of Sartre, for instance, were immensely pernicious among the French-educated leaders of Third World countries in Southeast Asia and North Africa. The genocidal leaders of the Pol Pot regime, for instance, were in a sense Sartre’s children. In general, however, the humanist impact was ephemeral and in many respects superficial. Millions read Wells and saw the plays of George Bernard Shaw, found them clever, were impressed for a time, then laughed, as the absurdities and misjudgments— and indeed essential frivolity—of both became manifest, and went their ordinary, humble ways as before. Russell, like Sartre, retained a small, fanatical following to the end; but had neither man existed, such grotesque disciples would have found equally irrational and eccentric masters to serve.
Far more dangerous than the humanist impact have been the twentieth-century attempts to find substitutes for God—attempts both conscious and unconscious—which appeal not so much to the intellectual pretensions but to much deeper, darker, and stronger instincts in mankind. I regard the central element in the modern tragedy of mankind to be the First World War, which began in Europe in 1914 and which America joined three years later. Its destructive impact on established and improving notions of human behavior and international morality was immeasurable and we are still suffering from its consequences. This war was not merely without reason, it was plainly avoidable. What caused it? I suggest it was, above all, the worship of money and still more power which already, by 1914, was becoming for many people a substitute for the worship of God. I have already noted that in Europe the population percentage attending church regularly began to decline, for the first time, from the end of the 1880s. Now church attendance in not a key, certainly not the key, to social and individual morality. But history suggests that the regular practice of a structured religion does impose restraints on human appetites, both individual and collective, which are difficult to achieve by any other means.
In the United States church attendance continued to rise until the 1950s but in Europe its fall was accompanied by a marked and progressive increase in materialism, at all levels of society. What is materialism? It is the belief that the object of life is to satisfy instinctual human desires to possess, use, consume, and control. At the lower levels of society, the growth of materialism leads to forms of moral squalor which make the heart sick and destroy decency and happiness. At the highest levels it leads to war, and to war on a scale and of a savagery hitherto inconceivable. The growth of GNPS in the years 1890-1914, especially in the United States, Russia, Germany and Japan, was truly prodigious. This led to greedy competition and, not least, fear.
One primary cause of the world war was terror among Germany’s rulers that Russian industrial growth was now so rapid, and must inevitably be reflected in such growing military power, that Germany, with her weaker ally Austria, must provoke the Russian bear into conflict while they were still strong enough to overwhelm the monster. The courts of Central and Eastern Europe were still nominally Christian but riddled with superstition and Erastianism. Russian Orthodoxy was a state church of the most craven kind. Prussian Lutheranism was an enthusiastic bedfellow of a totally militarized society. Austrian Catholicism was a formal palace creed which had long since cut itself off from spiritual roots of any kind. In France, the militant secularists won an overwhelming political victory in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair and had systematically purged the state, the schools and the armed forces of Christian influences. In all four states, the spiritual vacuum thus created was increasingly filled by adoration of power, above all military power. Guns replaced altars, and barracks churches. Thus, the stage for catastrophe was set.
The war was fought with a degree of unscrupulousness and high technology—and thus violence—never before experienced in world history. It reversed the increasing civility of the nineteenth century and introduced an era of extremism in thought and action which itself bred systematic attempts to create totalitarian alternatives to religion. These produced formula for horrors yet unimagined by man. The first, the Soviet Communism imposed on Russia from 1917, specifically denied the existence of God, whom its ideological mentor, Karl Marx, described as an imaginative superstructure on the capitalist system of production. Change the system, and the notion of religion itself would gradually fade from men’s minds.
Well, the system was certainly changed, but it was nonetheless found necessary to close down thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques, add compulsory atheism to the school curriculum, and slaughter thousands of practicing Christians, Jews, and Moslems, policies which continued unremittingly until the late 1980s. Grotesque secular alternatives to traditional Christian practices were devised. Baptism and confirmation were replaced by induction into the komsomol youth movement. Elaborate but lifeless secular marriage services were conducted in Moscow’s Hall of Weddings. The founder Lenin, once dead, was installed in a patriarchal tomb and worshipped. His successor Stalin was adored while yet alive and, like the savage gods of Aztec Mexico, demanded and received worship by hecatombs of sacrificial victims.
Other living gods sprang up from the diseased bowels of this alternative religion: petty but nonetheless bloodthirsty deities like Hoxha of Albania and Ceaucescu of Romania, and self- proclaimed supergods like China’s Mao, who wrote and forced his entire nation to learn by heart his catechism or Little Red Book and who performed “miracles,” such as swimming 20 miles in the Yangtze at the age of 75. When this entire worldwide system of murder, mendacity and fraud began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, evidence of every form of corruption known to man began to emerge from this system based on “reason” and “idealism”—rather as, when the triumphant Christians first took over pagan Alexandria, they discovered that wooden idols which miraculously spoke oracles had hidden recesses in which the devil- priests had concealed themselves while oraculating and from which now sprang forth swarms of mice and rats and other vermin.
This first totalitarian alternative to God bred others. Mussolini, himself originally an orthodox Marxist, praised by Lenin, then branded a heretic, founded a new political church. He adopted the symbols of ancient, pagan Rome, but his fascist movement was never quite sure whether to deny the existence of God, or subvert and utilize it, whether to persecute the Church or exploit it. Mussolini himself oscillated between atheist braggadocio and craven superstition typical of the most primitive forms of Italian Catholicism, but it was still unclear whether he was a Christian when, in 1945 summarily executed, he was hung, naked and upside down, alongside his mistress on the shores of Lake Garda.
Hitler’s Naziism, based on both the Soviet and Italian models but with many characteristics drawn from South Germany and Austria, was more deliberately and consciously an attack on Christianity, and an alternative to it. It preached various forms of purity, including race-purity. Hitler spoke of “the higher morality of the Party” to justify mass murder, just as Lenin used the excuse of what he called “the Revolutionary conscience.” The Nazis devised elaborate quasi-religious services, ranging from mass parades with sacred torches, to private wedding ceremonies between party members, who had to prove their Aryan ancestry. Both involved ancient pagan practices, such as sacrificial fires, sprinkling of salt, incense and other substances, the swearing of vows and blood-pledges, and millenarian hymns. The striking characteristic of Hitler’s alternative to God is that while in theory appealing to the highest human ideals, it exploited in practice the basest human instincts—cruelty, greed, corruption, and the desire to tyrannize over the weak. It also combined a yearning for a primitive past, the pagan forest culture of the Niebelungenleid, with the rapid acquisition and use of the most modern methods of warfare, torture, and mass-slaughter. Hitler’s own end illustrated this sinister paradox, he being immolated on a pagan funeral pyre enflamed by ersatz gasoline.
Such totalitarian substitutes for religion spread rapidly in the 1960s, following the withdrawal of the colonial powers, to Africa and parts of Asia. Voltaire’s dictum that religion was the enemy of mankind rang particularly hollow in Southeast Asia (as well as China), where the missionary Catholicism of the French was replaced by the totalitarian poverty and militarism of Ho Chi Minh, who soon had the largest armed forces, in relation to population, in the world, and by the genocide of Pol Pot. Missionaries had been accused of many “crimes” in Africa and the East. Of trying to stamp out human sacrifice, polygamy, and cannibalism, for instance, of forcing local women to cover their nakedness, and their husbands to make love to them in the orthodox “missionary position.” What a golden age it now seemed, as large parts of Africa embraced the Communist alternative to God, and so plunged themselves into civil and internecine wars, perpetrated man-made famines, as had Stalin in Russia, and acquired huge armies and modern weapons at the cost of everything else. The martyrdom of Ethiopia—a Christian state, if an elementary and rough-hewn one, since the fourth century—has been and continues to be of particular poignancy, as its noble-looking and God-fearing people are decimated by endless civil war, famine and disease. And, in many parts of black Africa, where missionaries had tried to introduce Western standards of moral behavior along with their altars, self-made chieftains, now calling themselves generals and presidents, reverted to mass-slaughter on a colossal scale and in some cases to cannibalism also. The witch doctor and the commissar walked hand in hand to assist in this continental tragedy.
In the minds of almost all intelligent people in the West, these totalitarian alternatives to God, whether sophisticated or primitive, have now been irrefutably demonstrated to be incorrigibly destructive and evil. Belief in them lingers on, even there now fitfully, only in that home of lost causes, the university campus. There are still Marxist dons, I believe, just as, if Hitler had won the war, there would still be Nazi dons. But the intellectual consensus has now belatedly joined the common sense consensus, that totalitarianism is the negation of morality. However, that does not mean that the search for Godless solutions has been abandoned. Quite the contrary. Even Marxism itself, though conclusively and repeatedly demonstrated to be a system of thought without the smallest merit, created by an intellectual crook who constantly invented and manipulated his so-called “scientific evidence,” has reappeared in a quasi-religious form in the teachings known as Liberation Theology. This is plainly and simply an anti-Christian heresy, without any moral basis, and indeed, as experience in Latin America has shown, a source of violence and great moral evil. I believe that the Church authorities will increasingly treat it as the heresy that it is, and that its following will rapidly diminish as the decade proceeds.
What worries me more are the non-Marxist alternatives to God now being canvassed, because some at least of them contain elements of rationality and even of justice and therefore exercise a genuine appeal. A left-wing acquaintance of mine, whom I think I should now term a former Marxist, not so long ago expressed himself undaunted by the intellectual collapse of communism as a system for promoting prosperity combined with equality. Marxist economic theory, he argued, and its stress on the industrial aspects of materialism, had always been a handicap. “What we can now turn to,” he said, “are far more attractive and exciting forms of action—race politics, sex politics, environmental politics, health politics. There are other forms of action which will emerge in due course whereby we will transform and overthrow existing society.”
Now this address is not concerned with the overthrow or defense of existing society but with the alternatives to God men have proposed in our times. But to some extent the two topics are the same. The radical agenda my acquaintance listed does, as it were, with its strong appeal to the idealistic, as well as the materialistic, instincts of mankind, especially among young people, constitute an alternative religion. Like any other form of humanism, it replaces God by Man, and the welfare—or supposed welfare—of Man, rather than the worship of God, and obedience to his commandments, as the object of human existence and the purpose of society. That, of course, is its radical defect. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once argued that it is the consciousness of God—the acceptance that there is a power outside and above ourselves, to whom we owe allegiance and whose guidance we must follow—which essentially distinguishes mankind from other creatures. If, which God forbid, belief in God were ever to fade completely from the human mind, we would not, Promethean-like, become master of our fate; on the contrary, we would descend to the status of very clever animals and our ultimate destiny would be too horrible to contemplate.
I believe this argument to be profoundly true, and corroborated by history, and what worries me about the new radical agenda is the danger that it will de-humanize man just as the totalitarian alternatives did, though no doubt in rather different ways. But there are further, related objections. All the items on the agenda lend themselves to extremism. Take, for instance, the issue of homosexuality, an important part of the sex politics item. There were many of us, in the 1960s, who felt that there were grave practical and moral objections to the criminalization of homosexuality and who therefore supported as happened in most western countries change in the law which meant that certain forms of homosexuality ceased to be unlawful. Homosexuality itself was still to be publicly regarded by society, let alone by the churches, as a great moral evil, but men who engaged in it, within strictly defined limits, would no longer be sent to prison. We believed this change to be the maximum homosexuals deserved or could reasonably expect.
We were proved totally mistaken. De-criminalization made it possible for homosexuals to organize openly into a powerful lobby, and it thus became a mere platform from which further demands were launched. Next followed demands for equality, in which homosexuality was officially placed on the same moral level as normal forms of sexuality, and dismissal of identified homosexuals from sensitive positions, for instance in schools, children’s homes, etc., became progressively more difficult. This was followed in turn by demands not merely for equality but privilege: the appointment, for instance, of homosexual quotas in local government, the excision from school textbooks and curricula, and university courses, passages or books or authors they found objectionable, special rights to proselytize, and not least the privilege of special programs to put forward their views—including the elimination of the remaining legal restraints—on radio and TV. Thus, we began by attempting to right what was felt an ancient injustice and we ended with a monster in our midst, powerful and clamoring, flexing its muscles, threatening, vengeful and vindictive towards anyone who challenges its outrageous claims, and bent on making fundamental—and to most of us horrifying—changes to the civilized patterns of sexual behavior.
Here indeed we have sexual politics in action. And, as with other alternatives to God, the result is not human happiness, but human misery. The homosexual community, as they now styled themselves, by their reckless promiscuity during the 1970s and 1980s, brought down on their members the fearful scourge of AIDS, a killer disease of a peculiarly horrible nature, for which there is no cure, and no immediate likelihood of a cure. Nor are homosexuals the only ones to suffer from sexual politics. Venereal diseases of all kinds, some unresponsive to even the latest antibiotics, are spreading rapidly. So is divorce. The percentage of one-parent families, with all the misery that entails, rises remorselessly. The number of illegitimate births, another prime source of human unhappiness, is now over 50 percent in some great cities, and in some parts of Washington, D.C. I understand it is now as high as 90 percent.
The object of sex politics is supposedly hedonistic. What a bitter irony is there! I often think of my old friend and college contemporary Ken Tynan, another figure I describe in my book Intellectuals. Marvelously gifted, world- famous early in life, he became a leading evangelist of sexual liberation. It was his religion, and sex was his god. He distinguished himself, if that is the word, by being the first person to use a four-letter word on British TV, and later by devising the pornographic stage-show, Oh, Calcutta! But the god he worshipped proved false and vengeful: his career, his private life, his health, all collapsed, and his end, at a tragically early age, was sad, lonely and hopeless.
Race politics, like sex politics, constitute an alternative religion for some, and in many ways are open to the same objections. They begin with a legitimate demand, and then proceed rapidly to request, indeed insist on, unwarranted privilege. Positive discrimination is a moral evil, almost as great as its negative form, for by giving one man more than justice it must, by definition, give another less. Nor does it work, nor is it ever likely to achieve its objects but, instead, like all forms of extremism, arouses hatred and disgust, and countervailing forces. What is essentially wrong with race politics is that they are fueled not by love and reason, but by fury and bitterness. How much more valid, and helpful, and likely in the long run to raise the condition of hitherto underprivileged races, is the Christian teaching that all men and women are equal in the sight of God. It is the true multiracialism, just as it is the true sexuality, and—dare I say it?—the true socialism.
I detect the same incipient signs of extremism in other items on the new radical agenda. Environmentalism, for instance, starts from the sound premise that the earth is our heritage and our responsibility, and that we must conserve it for our progeny. That, indeed, has always been sound Christian doctrine, which teaches that man has no absolute rights of possession and that all is on leasehold from his Maker. But environmental politics can degenerate into a new form of pantheism, indeed of paganism, in which notions like Mother Earth assume spiritual and mystic significance, and we are in danger—rather like the Nazis, themselves notable Greens in their origins—of reverting to primitive patterns and, like our distant ancestors, worshipping woods and rocks and rivers and animals.
I see somewhat similar dangers in the developing movement of health politics, a new name for what used to be called eugenics. The quest for health at almost any cost characterized the interwar period and was particularly marked in totalitarian societies. Stalin treated his opponents as insane, and locked them up in psychiatric hospitals. Hitler murdered the insane to improve the stock of his race, and when this practice was abandoned in response to Christian pressure—the only success the churches ever had in deflecting him from a policy—he used the death laboratories thus prepared as a pilot project for the “final solution” of the “Jewish problem.” We do not yet murder the insane—perhaps we never will—but we slaughter unborn babies throughout the world literally in their millions, and there are already countries—the Netherlands, for example—where euthanasia is on the verge of legality and is indeed already widely practiced. In some ways health politics is already the most threatening item of all on the secular agenda which constitutes the contemporary alternative to God.
But the practice of abortion and euthanasia reminds us of one important point which lies at the very heart of man’s failure to find the alternative spiritual comfort and moral leadership which only belief in God can provide. These alternative secular systems can kill. Oh, yes, they can do that only too easily: whether the six million Jews slaughtered by Hitler, or the 20 million Russians done to death by Stalin, or Pol Pot’s massacre of a third of the population of Campuchea, or Mao’s prodigious mass-slaughters on a scale we do not yet exactly know—or the millions of infants we do not permit to be born at all, let alone live. All these systems can end life, but they cannot prolong it. The greatest of all human problems—the problem of death—they cannot solve. The secular mighty of the world—the tyrants, the kings, the arrogant intellectuals, the men and women who think they know all the answers, the clever dons, the oh-so-brilliant writers—all alike are sentenced to death from the moment of their birth, and sooner or later, that sentence is carried out.
The point was made with somber brilliance by that great adventurer and writer Sir Walter Raleigh, on the last page of his History of the World. It was written in the Tower of London, while under sentence of death from his implacable enemy, King James I. The passage is plainly directed at this conceited king, once called “the wisest fool in Christendom,” but it applies to all who set themselves above law and morality: “O eloquent, just and mightie Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded. What none hath dared, thou hast done, and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only has cast out of the world and despiseth. Thou has drawn together all the far- stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words—Hic jacet—here lies.”
It is because sensible men the world over, at all times, have recognized and accepted the inevitability of mighty death, that they have turned to God to explain its significance. Without God, death is horrific. With God, death is still fearsome, but it can be seen to have a meaning and a purpose and a hope. The great strength of Christianity has always been that it brings men and women to terms with death in a way which offers them comfort and an explanation. Of course, the explanation is not complete. How could it be? As St. Paul writes, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.” God cannot be replaced because only belief in him offers a “then.”
There is a famous passage in the first volume of history, and it is a great one, written by a member of the English-speaking race, St. Bede, after whom I am proud to be named. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he tells the story of how Paulinus first preached the new doctrine of Christianity at the pagan court of King Edwin of Northumbria, and in particular of how he gave the Christian explanation of death and what followed it. This explanation has always been clear and unequivocal; it was then, as it is now. And so it struck these rude pagans. There was a moment of silence, and then a wise old Earl spoke. Life, he said, was short. It was like a sparrow, in winter, flying through the king’s hall. “It goes from darkness into the light, then into the darkness again—that is life.” “This life of man,” he added, “appears for a short space, but of what went before, and what is to follow, we know nothing. If, then, this new teaching gives us certitudes, we should follow it.”
There is no substitute for God: this our own dreadful century has abundantly proved. But I do not myself think that belief in God can be demonstrated like some mathematical theorem. It cannot be proved, in the sense we humans understand the word. It is something we intuit, and accept, and something, too, we reach, or reinforce, by prayer. Those who try to find substitutes for God not only fail, and often bring down incalculable misery on themselves, they throw away something marvelous. I want to end with some lines from the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, who makes the point far better than ever I could. Thompson was an unfortunate man, whose own life became and remained a mess, but on the central point of the purpose of life he was strong and sure. So he wrote:
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The Angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.