It may be all
true enough in a sense, but it often leaves the sense of beauty and
interest and emotion and poetry unfed; it does not represent the
fulness of life. The people who are dissatisfied with it all are
often dumbly ashamed of their dissatisfaction, but yet it does not
feed the heart; the kind of heaven that they are taught awaits them
is not a place that they recognise as beautiful or desirable. They
do not want to do wrong, or to rebel against morality at all, but
they have impulses which do not seem to be recognised by technical
religion: adventure, friendship, passion, beauty, the strange and
wonderful emotions of life. The work of great poets and artists and
musicians, the lovely scenes of earth, these seem to have no place
inside systematic religion, to be things rather timorously
permitted, excused, and apologised for. Men need something richer,
freer, and larger. They do not want to shirk their duty or to
follow evil; but many things seem to be insisted upon by religion
as important which seem unimportant, many beliefs spoken of as true
which seem at best uncertain. It is not that such people are
disloyal to God and to virtue, but they feel stifled and confined
in an atmosphere which dares not attribute to God many of the
finest and sweetest things in the world.
Such a feeling is not so much a rebellion against old ideas, as a
new wine which is too strong for the old bottles; it is a desire to
extend the range of ideals, to find more things divine.
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