But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to
gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they
feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still
urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude
inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power
and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint.
Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their
morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors
are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so
repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have
become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in
some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the
world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the
mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realized that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us:
Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God
exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own
conscience?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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