everyone has heard people quarreling sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant however it sounds I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say they say things like this how' you like it if anyone did the same to you that's my seat I was there first leave him alone he isn't doing you any harm why should you shove in first give me a bit of your orange I gave you a bit of mine come on you promised people say things like that every day educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grown-ups now what interest me about all these remarks is that the person making them is not merely saying that the other person's Behavior does not happen to please him he is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other person to know about and the other person very seldom replies to hell with your standard nearly always they try to make out that what they have been doing does not really go against the standard or that if it does there is is some special excuse they pretend there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it or that things were quite different when they were given the bit of orange or that something has turned up that lets them off keeping their promise it looks in fact very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of law rule of fair play Decent Behavior or morality whatever you like to call it about which they really agreed and they have if they had not they might fight like animals but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarreling means trying to show that the other person is in the wrong there would be no sense in trying to do that unless both of you agreed on what right and wrong are just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football this law or rule about right and wrong used to be called The Law of nature nowadays when we talk about the laws of nature we usually mean things like gravitation or her it or the laws of chemistry but when the older thinkers called The Law of right and wrong the law of nature they meant the law of human nature the idea was that just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws so the creature called man also had his law with this great difference that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not but a person could choose either to obey or disobey the law of human nature each person is at every moment subject to several different sets of laws but there is only one of these laws that they are free to disobey as a body they are subject to gravitation and cannot disobey it if you leave them unsupported in midair they will have no more choice about falling than a stone would as an organism they are subject to various biological laws which they cannot disobey any more than an animal can however the law that is peculiar to their human nature the law they do not share with animals vegetables or inorganic things is the one they can disobey if they choose choose this law was called the law of nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be Tau it they did not mean of course that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it just as you might find a few people who are colorblind or have no ear for a tune but taking the race as a whole they thought that the human idea of Decent Behavior was obvious to everyone and I believe they were right if they were not then all the things we said about the war were nonsense what was the sense in saying the enemy was in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the nais at the bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced if they had no notion of what we mean by right though we might still have had to fight them we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair some people say the idea of a law of nature or Decent Behavior known to All Humans is unsound because different civilizations and ages have had different moralities but this is not true there have been differences between their moralities but these differences have never amounted to anything like a total difference if anyone compares the moral teachings of the ancient Egyptians Babylonians Hindus Chinese Greeks and Romans what will really strike them is how very alike they are to each other and to our own for example no Society has admired selfishness or cowardice in battle whenever you find a person who says they do not believe in real right and wrong you will often find them going back on this a moment later they may break a promise to you but if you try breaking one to them they will complain it's not fair before you can even finish explaining yourself the truth is we all believe in decency so deeply that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it and consequently we try to shift the responsibility the truth is we believe in decency so much we feel the rule or law pressing on us so strongly that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it and consequently we try to shift the responsibility for you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations it is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry we put our good temper down to ourselves these then are the two points I wanted to make first that human beings all over the Earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way and cannot really get rid of it secondly that they do not in fact behave in that way they know the law of nature they break it these two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in if they are the foundation I had better stop to make that Foundation firm before I go on some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this law of human nature or moral law or rule of Decent Behavior is for example some people wrote to me saying isn't what you call the moral law simply our herd Instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts now I do not deny that we may have a herd Instinct but that is not what I mean by the moral law we all know what it feels like to be prompted by Instinct by Mother Love or sexual instinct or the Instinct for food it means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way and of course we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person and no doubt that desire is due to the herd Instinct but feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger you will probably feel two desires one a desire to give help due to your her Instinct the other a desire to keep out of danger due to the Instinct for self preservation but you will find inside you in addition to these two impulses a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help and suppress the impulse to run away now this thing that judges between two instincts that decides which should be encouraged cannot itself be either of them you might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you at a given moment to play one note on the piano and not another is itself one of the notes on the keyboard the moral law tells us the tune we have have to play our instincts are merely the keys another way of seeing that the moral law is not simply one of our instincts is this if two instincts are in conflict and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts obviously the stronger of the two must win but at those moments when we are most conscious of the moral law it usually seems to be tell us to side with the weaker of the two impulses you probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning but the moral law tells you to help him all the same and surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is I mean we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd Instinct by waking up our imaginations and housing our pity and so on so as to get up enough Steam for doing the right thing but clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is the thing that says to you your herd instinct is asleep wake it up cannot itself be the herd Instinct the thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note note here is a third way of seeing it if the moral law was one of our instincts we ought to be able to point to someone impulse inside us which was always what we call good always in agreement with the rule of right Behavior but you cannot there is none of our impulses which the moral law may not sometimes tell us to suppress and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage it is a mistake to think that some of our impulses say mother love or patriotism are good and others like sex or the fighting Instinct are bad all we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining Mother Love or patriotism but there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting Instinct there are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or country strictly speaking there are no such things as good and bad bad impulses think once again of a piano it has not got two kinds of notes on it the right notes and the wrong ones every single note is right at one time and wrong at another the moral law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts it is something which makes a kind of tune the tune we call goodness or right conduct by directing the Instincts by the way this point is of great practical Consequence the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs there is not one of them which will not make us into Devils if we set it up as an absolute guide you might think love of humanity in general was safe but it is not if you leave out Justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials for the sake of humanity and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man other people wrote to me saying isn't what you call the moral law just a social convention something that is put into us by education I I think there is a misunderstanding here the people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers then that thing must be merely a human invention but of course that is not so we all learned the multiplication table at school a child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it but surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked I fully agree that we learn the rule of Decent Behavior from parents and teachers and friends and books as we learn everything else but some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different we learn to keep to the left of the road but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right and others of them like mathematics are real truths the question is to which class the law of human nature belongs there are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics the first is as I said said in the first chapter that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another the difference are not really very great not nearly so great as most people imagine and you can recognize the same law running through them all whereas mere conventions like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear May differ to any extent the other reason is this when you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another have any of the changes been improvements if not then of course there could never be any moral progress progress means not just changing but changing for the better if no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to Savage morality or Christian morality to Nazi Morality In fact of course we all do believe that some moralities are better than others we do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call reformers or pioneers people who understood morality better better than their neighbors did very well then the moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another you are in fact measuring them both by a standard saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other but the standard that measures two things is something different from either you are in fact comparing ing them both with some real morality admitting that there is such a thing as a real right independent of what people think and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real right than others or put it this way if your moral ideas can be truer and those of the Nazis less true there must be something some real morality for them to be true about the reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place existing quite apart from what either of us thinks if when each of us said New York each meant merely the town I'm imagining in my own head how could one of us have truer ideas than the other there would be no question of Truth or falsehood at all in the same way if the rule of Decent Behavior meant simply whatever each Nation happens to approve there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse I conclude then that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behavior often make you suspect that there is no real natural law of behavior at all yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite but one word before I end I have met people who exaggerate the differences because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts for example one man said to me 300 years ago people in England were putting witches to death was that what you call the rule of human nature or right conduct but surely the reason we do not execute which is is that we do not believe there are such things if we did if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received Supernatural powers from him in return and we using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty then these filthy quizzing did there is no difference of moral principle here difference is simply about matter of fact it may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there you would not call a man Humane for ceasing to set mouse traps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter that there were two odd things about the human race first that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practice what you might call Fair Play or decency or morality or the law of nature second that they did not in fact do so now some of you may wonder why I call this odd it may seem to you the most natural thing in the world in particular you may have thought I was rather hard on the human race after all you may say what I call breaking the law of right and wrong or of nature only means that people are not perfect and why on Earth should I expect them to be that would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave but that is not my job at all I am not concerned at present with blame I am trying to find out truth and from that point of view the very idea of something being imperfect of its not being what it ought to be has certain consequences if you take a thing like a stone or a tree it is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise of course you may say a St is the wrong shape if you want to use it for a Rockery or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as much shade as you expected but all you mean is that the stone or tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own you are not except as a joke blaming them for that you really know that given the weather and the soil the tree could not have been any different what we from our point of view call a bad tree is obeying the laws of its nature just as much as a good one now have you noticed what follows it follows that what we usually call the laws of nature the way weather works on a tree for example may not really be laws in the strict sense but only in the manner of speaking when you say that falling Stones all always obey the law of gravitation is not this much the same as saying that the law only means what Stones always do you do not really think that when a stone is let go it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fail to the ground you only mean that in fact it does fail in other words you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves any law about what ought to happen as distinct from what does happen the laws of nature as applied to stones or trees may only mean what nature in fact does but if you turn to the law of human nature the law of Decent Behavior it is a different matter that law certainly does not mean what human beings in fact do for as I said before many of them do do not obey this law at all and none of them obey it completely the law of gravity tells you what Stones do if you drop them but the law of human nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not in other words when you are dealing with humans something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts you have the facts how men do behave and you also have something else how they ought to behave in the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts electrons and molecules behave in a certain way and certain results follow and that may be the whole story but men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently now this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it away for instance we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape namely that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you but that is simply untrue a man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first and a man who slipped into it while while my back was turned and removed my bag are both equally inconvenient but I blame the second man and do not blame the first I am not angry except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses with a man who trips me up by accident I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed yet the first has hurt me and the second has not sometimes the behavior which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all but the very opposite in war each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful but though they use him and pay him they regard him as human verman so you cannot say that what we call Decent Behavior in others is simply the behavior that happens to be useful to us and as for Decent Behavior in ourselves I suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behavior that pays it means things like being content with 30 Shillings when you might have got3 pounds doing schoolwork honestly when it would be easy to cheat leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her staying in dangerous places when you could go somewhere safer keeping promises you would rather not keep and telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment still it means what pays the human race as a whole and that consequently there is no mystery about it human beings after all all have some sense they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where everyone plays fair and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently now of course it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals classes and Nations being honest and fair and kind to each other it is one of the most important truths in the world but as an explanation of why we feel as we do about right and wrong it just misses the point if we ask why ought I to be unselfish and you reply because it is good for society we may then ask why should I care what's good for society except when it happens to pay me personally and then you will have to say because you you ought to be unselfish which simply brings us back to where we started you are saying what is true but you are not getting any further if a man asked what was the point of playing football it would not be much good saying in order to score goals for trying to score goals is the game itself not the reason for the game and you would really only be saying that football was football which is true but not worth saying in the same way if a man asks what is the point of Behaving decently it is no good replying in order to benefit Society for trying to benefit to society in other words being unselfish for society after all only means other people is one of the things Decent Behavior consists in all you are really saying is that Decent Behavior is Decent Behavior you would have said just as much if you had stopped at the statement men ought to be unselfish and that is where I do stop men ought to be unselfish ought to be fair not that men are unselfish nor that they like being unselfish but that they ought to be the moral law or law of human nature is not simply a fact about human behavior in the same way as the law of gravitation is or maybe simply a fact about how heavy objects behave on the other hand it is not a mere fancy for we cannot get rid of the idea and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did and it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience for the behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we find inconvenient and may even be the opposite consequently this rule of right and wrong or law of human nature or whatever you call it must somehow or other be a real thing a thing that is really there not made up by ourselves and yet it is not a fact in the ordinary sense in the same way as our actual behavior is a fact it begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality that in this particular case there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behavior and yet quite definitely real a real law which none of us made but which we find pressing on us let us sum up what we have reached so far in the case of stones and trees and things of that sort what we call the laws of nature may not be anything except a way of speaking when you say that nature is governed by certain laws this may only mean that nature does in fact behave in a certain way the so-called laws may not be anything real anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe but in the case of man we saw that this will not do the law of human nature or of right and wrong must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior in this case besides the actual facts you have something else a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in ever since men were able to think they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there and very roughly two views have been held first there is what is called the materialist view people who take that view think that matter and space just happened to exist and always have existed Nobody Knows Why and that the matter behaving in certain fixed ways has just happened by a sort of fluke to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think by one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life and the right temperature occurred on one of these PL planets and so some of the matter on this Earth came alive and then by a very long series of chances the living creatures developed into things like us the other view is the religious view three according to it what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know that is to say it is conscious and has purposes and prefers one thing to another and on this view it made the universe partly for purposes we do not know but partly at any rate in order to produce creatures like itself I mean like itself to the extent of having Minds please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place wherever there have been think men both views turn up and note this too you cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense science works by experiments it watches how things behave every scientific statement in the long run however complicated it looks really means something like I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15 and saw so and so or I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such and such a temperature and it did so and so do not think I am saying anything against science I am only saying what its job is and the more scientific a man is the more I believe he would agree with me that this is the job of Science and a very useful and necessary job it is too but why anything comes to be there at all and whether there is anything behind the things science observes something of a different kind this is not a scientific question if there is something behind then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way the statement that there is any such thing and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make and real scientists do not usually make them it is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of Half Bake science from textbooks who go in for them after all it is really a matter of Common Sense supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe is it not plain that the questions why is there a universe why does it go on as it does has it any meaning would remain just as they were now the position would be quite hopeless but for this there is one thing and only one is the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation that one thing is man we do not merely OB serve Men We Are Men in this case we have so to speak inside information we are in the know and because of that we know that men find themselves under a moral law which they did not make and cannot quite forget even when they try and which they know they ought to obey notice the following Point anyone studying man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside Knowledge from us but merely observing what we did would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law how could he for his observations would only show what we did and the moral law is about what we ought to do do in the same way if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather we by studying them from outside could never hope to discover it the position of the question then is like this we want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what is since that power if it exists would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them no mere observation of the facts can find it there is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more namely our own case and in that one case we find there is or put it the other way around if there was a controlling power outside the Universe it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house the only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way and that is just what we do find inside ourselves surely this ought to arouse our suspicions in the only case where you can expect to get an answer the answer turns out to be yes and in the other cases where you do not get an answer you see why you do not suppose someone asked me when I see a man in a blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packets at each house why I suppose that they contain letters I should reply because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it does contain a letter and if he then objected but you've never seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting I should say of course not and I shouldn't expect to because they're not addressed to me I'm explaining the packets I'm not allowed to open by the ones I'm allowed to open it is the same about this question the only packet I'm allowed to open is man when I do especially when I open that particular man called myself I find that I do not exist on my own that I am under a law that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way I do not of course think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree I should find exactly the same thing just as I do not think all the other people in the street get the same letters as I do I should expect for instance to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human nature he compel s the stone to obey the laws of its Stony nature but I should expect to find that there was so to speak a sender of letters in both cases a power behind the facts a director a guide do not think I am going faster than I really am I am not yet within a 100 miles of the god of Christian theology all I have got to is a something which is direct ing the universe and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions but of course it need not be very like a mind still less like a person in the next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it but one word of warning there has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last 100 years that is not what I am offering you can cut all that out note in order to keep this section short enough when it was given on the air I mentioned only the materialist View and the religious view but to be complete I ought to mention the in between view called life force philosophy or Creative Evolution or emergent Evolution the wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw but the most profound ones in those of bergson people who hold this view say that the small variation by which life on this planet evolved from the lowest forms to man were not due to chance but to the striving or purposiveness of a life force when people say this we must ask them whether by life force they mean something with the mind or not if they do then a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to Perfection is really a god and their View is thus identical with the religious if they do not then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind strives or has purposes this seems to me fatal to their view one reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the Less Pleasant consequences when you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its Crest if on the other hand you want to do something rather shabby the life force being only a blind force with no morals and no mind will never interfere fear with you like that trouble some God we learned about when we were children the life force is a sort of tame God you can switch it on when you want but it will not bother you all the Thrills of religion and none of the cost is the life force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the moral law somebody or something from Beyond the material Universe was actually getting at us and I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance you may even have thought that I had played a trick on you that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more religious jaw you may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say but if it turns out to be only religion well the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back if anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him first as to putting the clock back would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back back and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do but I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks we all want progress but progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer if you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most Progressive man we have all seen this when doing arithmetic when I have started to sum the wrong way the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again the faster I shall get on there is nothing Progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake and I think if you look at the present state of the world it is pretty plain that Humanity has been making some big mistake we are on the wrong road and if that is so we must go back going back is the quickest way on then secondly this has not yet turned exactly into a religious jaw we have not yet got as far as the god of any actual religion still less the god of that particular religion called Christianity we have only got As far as a sum body or something behind the moral law we are not taking anything from the Bible or the churches we are trying to see what we can find out about this somebody on our own Steam and I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock we have two bits of evidence about the somebody one is the universe he has made if we use that as our only clue then I think we should have to conclude that he was a great artist for the universe is a very beautiful place but also that he is quite merciless and no friend to man for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place the other bit of evidence is that moral law which he has put into our minds and this is a better bit of evidence than the other because it is inside information you find out more about God from the moral law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built now from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the being behind the univers universe is intensely interested in right conduct in Fair Play unselfishness courage good faith honesty and truthfulness in that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions that God is good but do not let us go too fast here the moral law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is good in the sense of being indulgent or soft or sympathetic there is nothing indulgent about the moral law it is as hard as Nails it tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful or dangerous or difficult it is to do if God is like the moral law then he is not soft it is no use at this stage saying that what you mean by a good God is a God who can forgive you're going to quick only a person can forgive and we have not yet got as far as a personal God only as far as a power behind the moral law and more like a mind than it is like anything else but it may still be very unlike a person if it is pure impersonal mind there may be no tense in asking it to make allowances for you or let you off just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you do your sums wrong you are bound to get the wrong answer and it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort an impersonal absolute goodness then you do not like him and are not going to bother about him for the trouble is that one part of you is on his side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation you may want him to make an exception in your own case to let you off this one time but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detest that sort of behavior then he cannot be good on the other hand we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do that is the terrible fix we are in if the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless but if it is then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow and so our case is Hope less again we cannot do without it and we cannot do with it God is the only comfort he is also the Supreme Terror the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from he is our only possible Ally and we have made ourselves his enemies some people talk as if meeting the Gaze of absolute goodness would be fun they need to think again they are still only playing with religion goodness is either the great safety or the great danger according to the way you react to it and we have reacted the wrong way now my third point when I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you I had a different reason my reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing Christianity tells people to repent and Promises them forgiveness it therefore has nothing as far as I know to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness it is after you have realized that there is a real moral law and a power behind the law and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that power it is after all this and not a moment sooner that Christianity begins to talk when you know you are sick you will listen too the doctor when you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about they offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it they offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the moral law and yet also a person they tell you how the demands of this law which you and I cannot meet have been met on our behalf how God himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God it is an old story and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more authority to talk about it than I have all I'm doing is to ask people to face the facts to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer and they are very terrifying facts I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable but I must say what I think true of course I quite agree that the Christian religion is in the long run a thing of unspeakable Comfort but it does not begin in Comfort it begins in the dismay I have been describing and it is no use at all trying to go on to that Comfort without first going through that dismay in religion as in war and everything else Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it if you look for truth you may find comfort in the end if you look for comfort you will not get either Comfort or truth or only soft soap and Wishful Thinking to begin with and in the end despair most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about International politics it is time we did the same about religion