Without certainty there can be no profound sense that a man’s own purpose has become part of the purpose of the whole creation. It is necessary to believe in a God who is active in the world before a man can feel himself to be, as St. Paul said, “a fellow laborer” with God. Yet this sense of partnership with a Person who transcends the individual’s own life, his own ego, and his own capacities, is fundamental in all popular religion. It underlies all the other elements of religion. For in the certainty that he is enlisted with God, man finds not only comfort in defeat, not only an ideal of holiness which persuades him to renounce his immediate desires, but an ecstatic mobilizing of all his scattered energies in one triumphant sense of his own infinite importance. CHAPTER IV [p051] THE ACIDS OF MODERNITY 1. _The Kingly Pattern_ What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume that it depends upon a clear conception of God. In truly religious men the experience of God is much more intensely convincing than any definition of his nature which they can put into words. They do not insist on understanding that which they believe, for their belief gives them a consciousness of divinity which transcends any conviction they could reach by the understanding. They are not oppressed by the conflict between reason and faith because the testimony of faith is irresistible. It may become so irresistible that any attempt to understand is finally held, as it was by John Chrysostom, to be an impertinence.