RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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to learn a little bit thoroughly, directly, through the heart; to begin,
in fact, to be human.
Evil.
"The modern mind" denies its existence. There must
be
sufficient indication to the contrary in any person's experience, out–
ward and secret, to account alone for many conversions. Many non–
religious people are convinced of the existence of evil as something
quite distinct from mere error, stupidity, unenlightened self-interest,
neurosis or environmental causality, and such people cannot sub–
scribe to the still popular assumption that all the wrong in this
world is only a little worse than a bad cold; but it appears that only
the religious are equipped to take the existence of evil very seriously,
or to act in relation to it very intelligently.
Sex.
The conception of sex primarily or exclusively as pleasure
must have done damage as deep .and vicious in this time as the dead–
liest of the religious attitudes towards sex can ever have done. Among
surviving, conscious victims, many must become converts.
Personal causes.
The many sorrows, regrets, disasters, and gen–
erally well-justified recognitions of great harm done to oneself and
to others, which must accrue with exceptional grievousness to any
morally sensitive person who has spent a few decades under the
callow moral concepts which appear to be the best (for most people)
that the non-religious world has to offer.
Parenthood,
in most people, awakens the intelligence and makes
it doubt itself, and awakens the heart and soul as well; most of us
who are ever going to have begun to experience parenthood, by
now. With such matters as the above to ruminate and to act upon per–
sonally, in a re-awakening of the whole being, almost anyone might
find himself more sensitive than ordinarily, towards religion.
Age.
Perhaps the current wave of conversions may be consider–
ably accounted for by two main facts: that our particular generation
is moving into middle-age-the age during which one is apt to be–
come exceptionally sensitive to religion; and that this generation
(in this country anyhow) is the first which has grown up in an essen–
tially non-religious climate-which, in other words, has never be–
fore been exposed to the infection. Much might be said to support
the suggestion that these middle years are highly susceptible in any
time to religious conversion-all the more so among those who de–
voted their early maturity to rebellion or pleasure. Thinking of Tol-
