Conceivably men might once again imagine another drama which was as great as the epic of the Christian Bible. But like _Paradise Lost_ or _Faust_, it would remain a work of the imagination. While the intellectual climate in which we live is what it is, while we continue to be as conscious as we are of how our own minds work, we could not again accept naively such a gorgeous fable of our destiny. Yet only five hundred years ago the whole [p117] of Christendom believed that this story was literally and objectively true. God was not another name for the evolutionary process, or for the sum total of the laws of nature, or for a compendium of all noble things, as he is in modernist accounts of him; he was the ruler of the universe, an omnipotent, magical King, who felt, who thought, who remembered and issued his commands. And because there was such a God, whose plan was clearly revealed in all its essentials, human life had a definite meaning, morality had a certain foundation, men felt themselves to be living within the framework of a universe which they called divine because it corresponded with their deepest desires. If we ask ourselves why it is impossible for us to sum up the meaning of existence in a great personal drama, we have to begin by remembering that every great story of this kind must assume that the universe is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as the promptings of the human heart. Otherwise it would not greatly interest us. A story, however plausible, about beings who had no human qualities, a plot which unfolded itself as utterly indifferent to our own personal fate, would not serve as a substitute for the Christian epic. This is the trouble with the so-called religion of creative evolution: even if it is true, which is far from certain, it is so profoundly indifferent to our individual fate, that it leaves most men cold. For there are very few who are so mystical as to be able to sink themselves wholly in the hidden purposes of an unconscious natural force. This, too, as the Catholic Church has always insisted, is the trouble with pantheistic religion, for if everything is [p118] divine, then nothing is peculiarly divine, and all the distinctions of good and evil are meaningless. The story must not only assume that human ideals inspire the whole creation, but it must contain guarantees that this is so. There must be no doubt about it. Science must confirm the moral assumptions; the highest and most certain available knowledge must clinch the conviction that the story unfolded is the secret of life. 3. _Earmarks of Truth_ Religious teachers who were close to the people have always understood that they must perform wonders if they were to make their God convincing and their own title to speak for him valid. The writer of Exodus, for example, was quite clear in his mind about this: