RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
335
it owes to its primitive sources.
If
anti-Semitism grows and wanes
with social crises, it is also true that the continuity of anti-Semitism,
its persistence as a strong tradition in the Western World,
is
due
to Christian teaching concerning the Jews; that great forerunner of
the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Aquinas, condemned the
Jews to eternal servitude.
A further point to consider is that if truth has a moral value–
I mean the respect for truth and the associated virtues of intellectual
courage and scruple and self-dedication to the advance of knowledge
-it would be immoral for minds with a strict ideal of truth to
accept the traditional religious beliefs: the existence of a superna–
tural being, the dependence of morality on such a belief, the various
absurd stories, miracles and theological doctrines like original sin,
the resurrection and reincarnation of the dead, the immortality of
the soul, reward and punishment in a hereafter, etc. None of these
are acceptable to that reason which is man's parcel of divinity; their
allegorical justifications are scarcely more convincing. Traditional
atheism is frightfully crude and boring to sensitive minds; but it is
not more boring and crude than the catechism still accepted by
cultured Catholics.
During the last hundred and fifty years, the theologians have
been more and more inclined to disregard these traditional elements
of belief; the logical demonstration of God's existence has given
way to an empirical grounding of faith in the personal experience of
God, and a literal interpretation of doctrine has been discouraged.
The attempts of scientists to bolster certain of the old arguments
have carried little weight.
Because of the intellectual difficulty, religion has been justified
"pragmatically" as a useful fiction in maintaining morality and the
social order, particularly for the ignorant and poor. Many statesmen
regard the encouragement of religion as an indispensable part of
state policy; on the eve of the French Revolution, the minister of
finance, Necker, said that when taxes are increased
it
is necessary to
increase religious instruction. This highly sophisticated, cynical con–
ception of God, let us observe,
is
also known among savages. The
ethnologists, Spencer .and Gillen, report that among the Central
Australians the youth is told at the initiation ceremony that "the
spirit creature, whom, up to that time, as a boy, he has regarded as
