Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle into the matter at all.  A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it.  The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out.  A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him.  That is Materialism if you like.  That is Atheism if you like.  If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything.  But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover.  My chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary.  They are the party of platitude.  They do not shake religion:  rather religion seems to shake them.  They can only answer the great paradox by repeating the truism.

THE METHUSELAHITE

I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining and deeply philosophical incident.  A man was enlisting as a soldier at Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry about what was his religion.  With an equal and ceremonial gravity the man wrote down the word “Methuselahite.”  Whoever looks over such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless the Army is going to the dogs.  But with all his specialist knowledge he could not “place” Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations of Protestantism.  He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant.  The soldier replied that it was his religion “to live as long as he could.”

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious problems and religious books.  Every day the daily paper reviews some new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as that word “Methuselahite.”  The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature.  That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli.  He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.