There is thus a very solid intellectual conception embedded in the faith of this great teacher who staked everything on the assertion that it is impossible to conceive God. The conception is there but it has not been isolated and realized. It is unconsciously assumed. We find the same thing in Luther when he said: “I venture to put my trust in the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created Heaven and Earth and is alone above all creatures.” For in spite of the fact that Luther calls God incomprehensible, he is able to make a number of extremely important statements about him. He is able to say that God is the only God, that he created the earth, that there is a heaven, that God created heaven, and that God alone is above all his creatures. To know that much about God is to comprehend the function of God if not his nature. Now if we examine the religious difficulty of modern men, we find, I think, that they do not lack the sense of mystery, of majesty, of terror, and of wonder which overwhelm Chrysostom and Luther. The emotional disposition is there. But it is somehow inhibited from possessing them utterly. The will to believe is checked by something in their experience which Chrysostom did not have. That something is the sense that the testimony of faith is not wholly credible, that the feeling of sanctity is no assurance of the existence of sacred powers, that awe and [p054] wonder and terror in the breast of the believer are not guarantees that there exist real objects that are awful and wonderful. The modern man is not incapable of faith, but he has within him a contrary passion, as instinctive and often as intense as faith, which makes incredible the testimony of his faith. It is that contrary passion, and not the thin argumentation of atheists and agnostics, which lies, I think, at the root of what churchmen call modern irreligion. It is that passion which they must understand if they are ever to understand the modern religious difficulty. For just as men could surmount any intellectual difficulty when their passion to believe was whole-hearted, so to-day, when the passion to disbelieve is so strong, they are unable to believe no matter how perfectly their theological dilemmas are resolved. We must ask ourselves, then, what there is in modern men which makes the testimony of faith seem more or less incredible to them. We have seen in the citations from Chrysostom and Luther that the testimony of faith really contains a large number of unconscious statements of fact about the universe and how it is governed. It is these statements of fact which we are no longer able to assume unconsciously, and having become conscious of them they are rather incredible. But why are they no longer unconsciously assumed and why are they incredible? The answer is, I think, that they have ceased to be consistent with our normal experience in ordinary affairs.