Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the pleasure of the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart of it. By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen world--a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations” that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,” he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy; and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the mind we find it waiting for us. There is a great saying to the effect that wherever two or three are gathered together, I shall be among you. But, alas! it is even more true perhaps (one must not forget a plenty of perhapses) that wherever two or three are gathered together, there I am _not_. Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility, both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? As old Doctor Donne found in the absence of his mistress, there is a “close corner of the brain” where the purest and loveliest embraces are possible. Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude. §3 The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great shift in the human notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then, later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony among infinite laws and forces. This process of magnifying God from a person to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly, as do all ideas. And there is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea to-morrow. More important than the novelty of ideas is the differential in the rate at which people accept them. Or it might even be put the other way round--the rate at which ideas accept people as vehicles. An idea often hops into a person and uses him, more or less as we hop into taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked, not unwisely, that his “Irrational Knot” was a first try (on the part of “the Life Force”) to get the theme of “A Doll’s House” written in English.