But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this joy and insight, this quick sensitiveness to beauty.  Some of them cannot find the eternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament, they either underrate or do not really see.  There are a great many good people who cannot take beauty seriously.  They become wooden and suspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive or enjoy a lovely object.  Incredible though it seems, it appears to them to be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, any unquestioning joy.  But there are other ways in which they, too, may come to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience which also demand it.  Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceive beauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror of the external world.  Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore with them!  Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door for the human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physical shell.  The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an argument for God drawn from subjective necessity.  But the postulate of sovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature is an argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God to explain the world.

For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective aspects of the truth, when we regard ourselves in our relation to the might of the physical universe.  For even as men feed upon its beauty, so they have found it necessary to discover something which should enable them to live above and unafraid of its material and gigantic power.  We have already seen how there appears to be a cosmic hostility to human life which sobers indeed those who are intelligent enough to perceive it.  It is only the fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who is unterrified by nature.  The man of reflection and imagination sees his race crawling ant-like over its tiny speck of slowly cooling earth and surrounded by titanic and ruthless forces which threaten at any moment to engulf it.  The religious man knows that he is infinitely greater than the beasts of the field or the clods of the highway.  Yet Vesuvius belches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark terror the great city which was full of men is become mute and desolate.  The proud liner scrapes along the surface of the frozen berg and crumples like a ship of cards.  There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a lifted arm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes and fears, the gorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are gone.  But the ice floats on unscarred and undeterred and the ocean tosses and heaves just as it did before.