=Thought Bound by Law.=--The teacher said: "When a young man comes and says he is a free-thinker, say to him: 'You lie. You think with your stomach, your throat, your sexuality, with your passions and your interests, your hate and your sympathies. But in your youthful immaturity you do not really think at all, but merely drivel. What is instilled into you, you give out, and dub your wishes by the name of thoughts.' Moreover 'free-thought' is a contradiction in terms, for thought obeys laws, just as sound, light, and chemical combinations do. Thought is bound, bound by laws. If you say 'There is no God,' you speak without thinking. 'Non-existence' and 'God' are two incommensurate ideas which cannot be brought into juxtaposition. If they are, there results an absurdity which is the secretion or excretion of an illogical and confused mind. "If on the other hand you say 'There is no God _for me_,' there is something probable in that. But you should be ashamed to speak of it. It only means that you are a godless dog, a perverse ape, a conscienceless deceiver and thief whom men must avoid and detectives must watch. Fortunately godlessness is an hallucination imposed on haughty blockheads as a punishment. When the 'free-thinker' discovers some day how stupid he is, then he is freed, and that is a mercy for him." =Credo quia (et-si) absurdum.=--The teacher said: "If I call myself a Christian it is because I recognise Christ as a power, a source of strength, from whom I obtain strength by prayer in order to support tolerably the burdens of life. But at the same time I confess that I cannot understand nor explain the doctrine of Atonement through sacrificial death. That is not, however, the fault of the doctrine but a defect in me. I have also no right to deny a matter of fact because I do not understand it. Here is an illustration. If I multiply 2 by 2 I obtain an increase--4. But if I multiply ½ by ½ I obtain as a result a decrease by half, _i.e._ ¼. Here is an incomprehensible contradiction. Multiplication cannot produce a decrease. Yet it is mathematically true that 2 multiplied by 2 is doubled, _i.e._ 4, but ½ multiplied by ½ is halved, _i.e._ ¼. My intelligence would fain deny it, but I must believe it, and in doing so I do well, otherwise the whole science of mathematics would be unusable, which would be a great loss. _Credo quia absurdum._ That means, I must believe a fact just because it is incomprehensible and absurd (for me, but not for others). If I could understand it, the emergency short-cut of 'faith' would not be necessary. That is the sacrifice, not of my reason, but of my rustic understanding and of my pride."