14REVIVAL OR DECAY?BUT WOULD YOU DENY', SAID THE HEADMASTER, `THAT there is, here in the West, agreat, even growing, int
14
REVIVAL OR DECAY?
BUT WOULD YOU DENY', SAID THE HEADMASTER, `THAT there is, here in the West, a great, even growing, interest in religion?'It is not the sort of question I find easy to answer. Great and growing would seem more to involve statistics, and I had no statistics. I supposed there was a fairly widespread interest. But I didn't feel sure the Headmaster was interpreting it correctly. In the days when most people had a religion, what he meant by `an interest in religion' could hardly have existed. For of course religious people - that is, people when they are being religious - are not `interested in religion'. Men who have gods worship those gods; it is the spectators who describe this as `religion'. The Maenads thought about Dionysus, not about religion. Mutatis mutandis this goes for Christians too. The moment a man seriously accepts a deity his interest in `religion' is at an end. He's got something else to think about. The ease with which we can now get an audience for a discussion of religion does not prove that more people are becoming religious. What it really proves is the existence of a large `floating vote'. Every conversion will reduce this potential audience.Once the climate of opinion allows such a floating vote to form I see no reason why it should speedily diminish. Indecision, often very honest, is very natural. It would be foolish, however, not to realise that it is also no hardship. Floating is a very agreeable operation; a decision either way costs something. Real Christianity and consistent Atheism both make demands on a man. But to admit, on occasion, and as possibilities, all the comforts of the one without its discipline-to enjoy all the liberty of the other without its philosophical and emotional abstinences - well, this may be honest, but there's no good pretending it is uncomfortable.a dimension which he takes for granted. Two instances may make the distinction clear. Once, after I had said something on the air about Natural Law, an old Colonel (obviously anima candida)'