IT is commonly averred that religion gives a fortitude and a peace of mind that no philosophy can provide; but for my part I cannot say that my observation of fact bears out any such contention. As I look about me or go back over my memories of people I have personally known, I do not find that the religious men I have met or dealt with (by “religious” I mean believing in some specific creed) have been any less agitated, any more self-contained than the non-believers of my acquaintance: joy and sorrow seem to have about, the same effects in the one case as in the other. Nor does history offer me a very different picture. The saints, especially the great saints who were also great men, were as restless, as hesitant, as little sure of themselves, as men not recognised as saints—just as much wracked by doubt, just as much tormented by moral scruple and the sense of impurity.

Of course it may be answered that because a man is a believer and a saint he is none the less a man and subject to human weakness and distress. Very well, let us leave the question of fact aside and ask instead for what reason religion should be expected to give a peace of mind which philosophy cannot afford.

A common answer is that religion offers the stable surety of faith. But this faith, this surety, this assurance, is in no sense the exclusive property of religion. Every thought, the moment it has been thought, becomes faith, surety, assurance: that is to say, it passes from flux to fixity, from thought to non-thought, from the dynamic to the stable, from the mobile to the static. Every system of thought has its corresponding faith. There is a materialistic faith and a positivistic faith, and so on for all kinds of isms; a faith, moreover, that is particularly conspicuous in the pupils and followers of the Founders, a faith that moveth mountains (oftentimes mountains of rubbish!).

But, it may now be answered, the faith of religion is unshakable, while the faiths of the philosophies and the schools lose their balance at every other moment.

This is not true. Philosophical faiths are as firm or, if you prefer, as shaky on their legs as the religions. For religious dogmas are also subject to discussion, and they evolve. If they hold their ground they are at least compelled to develop an apologetic—which would not be the case if no doubt in the matter of faith were possible.

This argument failing, perhaps another will fare better. Religions—some religions at any rate—posit the personality of a God and make possible some relation between the worshipper and this God—a relation that takes the form of prayer, of appeal for succour—our supreme refuge when, as Vico says, “all help from Nature faileth.” So this then would be the great consolation which philosophy can never give?

The trouble is that to appeal for succour is one thing and to get it is another. Prayer often remains unanswered; and we get the curious but not infrequent spectacle of the believer who, in such circumstances, comes to doubt the mercy and the justice of God, ceases to believe in Him and even reviles Him. But supposing the believer is a man of noble character and does not fall into this error? Supposing he becomes resigned to a Divine Will which sees farther than we can see? What, in this case, does he have that the non-religious man does not have—resignation, that is, acceptance of things as they are, faith in the rationality of the world and in some meaning for the world’s history?

But there is one last argument. It is said that religion, in some of its forms at least, is a great consoler, because it promises that all our hurts will be healed, all our losses made good, all our wrongs righted in another life that will vanquish even Death.

To tell the truth, here again I doubt whether the fact bears out the statement. All men, whether believers or non-believers, seem to have about the same fear and about the same disregard for pain and death; and they all seem to find equal consolation (when they do find it) in the same way: from Time, that is—by taking up their work in life again.

But the assertion is false if we examine it in theory. For this thought of a future life either remains, as Leibnitz would have said, a “dumb” thought, a thought that is not really thought and is therefore without efficacy—in which case it does not console. Or else it comes to be a sort of vague expectation of a blessing not really hoped for, as Heine facetiously remarked of immortality: though he did not believe in it, he said, he could not repress a lurking hope that after our death God might be reserving a “pleasant surprise” for us! Or finally, it must be a true and real thought, in which case we must actually think it.

So thinking it, examining it in its real meaning and implications, following it to its distant consequences, we see that life beyond the grave cannot be the life we know on earth. We see that the Heavenly Beatitude of the religions dehumanises earthly affections and therefore excludes and precludes them; that in Heaven, as it is commonly pictured to us, there can be neither fathers, nor mothers, nor children, nor brothers and sisters, nor wives, nor lovers—but just spirits absorbed in worship of God and indifferent to all else. In a word, the other life that the religions hold out to us is the exact opposite of the life we have lost or are about to lose on earth.

And yet it is this earthly life we long for, it is the only one we long for. In exchange for the child we have lost, the child who used to play about our house with such roguish tricks and cunning ways, we do not want an angel; for in that angel we should find our child transfigured, unrecognisable. The woman we would see again is not a woman exalted in the glory of God, whose lips we may not kiss, but the very woman whose lovely form we embraced in life.

Selfish thoughts, indeed, thoughts which we must overcome, and overcome in the thought, of an immortality purified of this alloy of selfishness which makes it incoherent and self-contradictory—an immortality such as philosophy holds out to us. For philosophy, as well as religion, bears witness to an immortality beyond our present lives and our present individualities. It demonstrates that every act of ours, the moment it is realised, is disjoined from us and lives an immortal life of its own; and since we are nothing else in reality than the series of our acts, we too are immortal, for to have lived once is to live forever.

And to me there seems to be much more consolation in this thought than in what religion promises; for it says exactly what religion says, but more clearly and with more assurance. And why should a consolation that is clear and demonstrable be less effective than one that is vague and lacking in proof?