_Initium sapientiae timor Domini_; no doubt, but such fear is only the beginning, and is not the kind of fear--which also exists--a fear which engenders an actual revulsion against the idea of God. It is to this kind of fear which the eminent Jesuit writer Wasmann alludes when he says that "in many scientific circles there is an absolute _Theophobia_, a dread of the Creator. I can only regret this," he continues, "because I believe that it is due chiefly to a defective knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology." That he is entirely right as to the existence of this feeling there can be no doubt; no one can read at all widely in scientific literature without becoming aware of it. Contrary to all the tenets of science there is even a bias against any such idea as that of a Creator, though science is supposed to confront all problems without bias of any kind. I need not cite instances of this feeling; I have dealt with it elsewhere. We may take it for granted, and proceed to look for an explanation for the phenomenon. Wasmann attributes it to ignorance, and he is, I feel sure, right; but let us examine the matter a little more closely. Why should persons--even if ignorant--have the bias which some obviously present against the idea of a God? Why should they wish to think that there is no such Being, no future existence, nothing higher than Nature? Some persons maintain that precedent to a denial of God there must be a moral failure. That I am sure is quite wrong. I should be far from saying that in some materialists there is not a considerable weakening of moral fibre, or perhaps it would be better put, a distortion of moral vision, as evidenced by many of the statements and proposals of eugenists, for example, and by the political nostrums of some who wrest science to a purpose for which it was not intended. This no doubt is true, but it is not quite the argument with which I am now dealing, and that argument, if it implies moral failure in the persons concerned, has little if any genuine foundation in fact. Mr. Devas, in that very remarkable book, _The Key to the World's Progress_, gives us the useful phrase "post-Christians." These people are really pagans living in the Christian era, retaining many of the excellent qualities which they owe neither to Nature nor to paganism, but to the inheritance--perhaps involuntary and unrecognised--of the influences of Christianity. Many of these people are kind, benevolent, scrupulously moral. They have not learned to be such from Nature, for Nature teaches no such lessons. Nor have they learnt them from paganism, for these are not pagan virtues. They are an inheritance from Christianity. Those, therefore, who build arguments as to the needlessness of religion on the foundation that persons without any belief in God do exhibit all the moral virtues, build on sand. At any rate the answer to the question which we are discussing is not to be found in this direction.