The disputes in theory—­I do not say the difference in reality—­between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic—­becomes at times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to students of physics, whether the scientific “ether” is real or a formula.  Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things, which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only by an intellectual process.  Most minds are disposed to treat this ether as a reality.  But the acutely critical mind insists that what is only so attainable by inference is not real; it is no more than “a formula that satisfies all phenomena.”

But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that satisfies all my forms of consciousness?

Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly real, from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy moral and spiritual phenomena.  The former has encountered him, the other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses.  One says God’s will is so; the other that Right is so.  One says God moves me to do this or that; the other the Good Will in me which I share with you and all well-disposed men, moves me to do this or that.  But the former makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of self-righteousness.

I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called “The Tyranny of Shams,” in which he displays very typically this curious tendency to a sort of religion with God “blacked out.”  His is an extremely interesting case.  He is a writer who was formerly a Roman Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff’s, to deny that anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in life except happiness, or any guide but “science.”  But—­and here immediately he turns east again—­he is careful not to say “individual happiness.”  And he says “Pleasure is, as Epicureans insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness.”  So he lets the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in.  So he opens indefinite possibilities of getting away from any merely materialistic rule of life.  And he writes: 

“In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and indifferent.  Some even make a pretence of justifying their inertness.  Why, they ask, should we stir at all?  Is there such a thing as a duty to improve the earth?  What is the meaning or purpose of life?  Or has it a purpose?