unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious.  But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind:  a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.  Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.  It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.  Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction?  Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?  They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.”  But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all.”

There is a thought that stops thought.  That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.  That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed.  It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own:  and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.”  In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come.  But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled.  The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason.  They were organized for the difficult defence of reason.  Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.  The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify:  these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—­the authority of a man to think.  We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.  For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.  In so far