But we shall be equally foolish
if now, in the interests of a new artificial clearness, we deny
another portion of experience just as our fathers ignored certain
other facts in the interests of their too well-defined systems. We
cannot hold to the old world view which would bend the modern mind to
the support of an inherited interpretation of experience and therefore
would not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we hold
new views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the most
precious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it would
darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it.
Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly
order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each
element with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of the
world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yet
trusted to a purely intellectual judgment.
So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sorts
of authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we do
not reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed
though we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the day
breaks and the shadows flee away.
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