This proud religious blindness has opened the highway for blind secular naturism. The one has played into the hands of the other; the blind has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy. Consider, for example, the quick succession and interplay of these three phases of the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of immediate justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion of justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of justification by faith in nothing--except primitive desire. In the third act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a specious emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing that modern sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation is in the works of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something by the exercise of which, so they feel, we may be saved--or at least vitally damned. Hence our very disillusion to-day is flown with pride. Our current disillusionists, not humbled by the fact that the modern rejection of moral severity is eventuating in a febrile weakness of the vital human appetites, continue to disparage that severity and to advocate, as our only hope, a romantic resurgence of those appetites. They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten banks; fancying, apparently, that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains,” immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as their Protestant forbears hymned a spurious Christ.[31] Consider, too, the dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists” and the “legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more and more into the breaches that modern religion has made in the human conscience. The psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist hope of reducing that mysterious citadel and of rearranging the whole soul on modern rational lines. They are teaching the oncoming generation to _think_ in a fashion indicated in the following remark made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a fellow tries to do the right thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the time very real; but of course, as soon as he _thinks_, he sees that this satisfaction isn’t real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers, one of them explained how religion and morality are being taken over and saved, in so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of tucking the setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand.