RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
139
It may be very misleading to suppose that something called religion
has now become "more credible" if we try to keep something called
"credibility" somehow the same in kind however it may vary in
degree. Credences may well be as diverse as the fauna or flora. We
talk,
of course, as if "believe" has the same sense in "I believe that 2
plus 2 equals 4"; "I believe that the sun will rise at 7: 10 tomorrow";
"I believe that Hamlet was mad"; "I believe that Justice is the great–
est of the virtues"; "I believe that I am immortal"; but there are
manifold disadvantages in
thinking
so. These are indeed type speci–
mens of different phyla. The grounds for these "beliefs" are different;
so are our procedures for discovering what is "believed," when some–
body says one of these things, and so, in other ways than through
content, are the outcomes. Why then do we suppose that the be–
lievings are the same? Laziness probably and fear and dislike of any
unfamiliar scepticism. It is hard, of course, to foresee what the re–
sults would be of a sustained inquiry into the varieties of the belief–
attitudes. I would expect, myself, that a considerable improvement
in
justice would be among them. "The scientific attitude," for example,
might well tum out to be many different attitudes appropriate within
different situations.
3. With adequately flexible conceptions of culture and religion,
neither seems to be dependent on the other, though religion has been
an important part of most cultures. Inquiry here is not furthered by
defining either culture or religion so as to settle their relations. I doubt
whether religion can carry much either of good or of evil without
being in some measure institutionalized. But the sustaining institu–
tion need not have the forms with which we are most familiar. It
could, for example, be medical or pedagogic rather than sacerdotal,
without depriving religion of a necessary character. Those chiefly
responsible for the institution could be a clerisy, as Coleridge put it,
rather than a clergy.
As
to the need to counter totalitarianism, all power vacua are
dangerous, spiritual vacua not least, as the parable of the seven other
devils points out.
(Matthew,
12:43)
If
one authority ceases to tell us
effectively what we should wish and should do and should be, we are
likely to look to another, being unwilling, for well understood reasons,
to assume responsibility for ourselves. Without at all wishing to be–
little the danger that men will replace a Church by the State, I may
