RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
457
lectuals to think themselves back into religion, and so not conclude
too hastily that we shall shortly have a homogeneously religious life
like that of the past. (This doesn't mean they shouldn't make the ef–
fort if they see fit, for .a man should follow his bent at all costs; but
it does warn us what we may expect
in
the present, or near future,
of any such "revival.") I would even question whether a modern
convert can
live
his belief in one of the orthodox religions in any–
thing but a tenuous way compared with the vigor and immediacy
of such orthodox belief in the past. Read Eliot's essay on Dante,
for example, and you do not get anything like the original figure, but
a strange creature, the Anglican Dante, a sweet refined intellectual
Christian, with all the raw strength of Dante's medieval belief (with–
out which there could not have been all those details of imagery in
the Inferno) left out because that robustness of belief is impossible
for the twentieth-century Anglican convert.
Where history has brought us can be seen if we turn to America,
the newest, and certainly the most irreligious civilization that has ever
existed. Of course, it will be objected that the churches are powerful
pressure groups in American life, that the books of Lloyd Douglas
have tremendous sales, and that
Life
magazine advertises religion
with its bathing beauties. Yes, and no better evidence could be given
of the fundamentally irreligious character of this new civilization.
Lloyd Douglas is as irreligious a writer as ever put a record on the
dictaphone, and as American too as that versiQn of the gospels
produced in the 'twenties that interpreted J esus as a successful
business executive. At the moment some of our intellectuals seem
to have discovered a very saleable commodity that might be called
"the higher Lloyd Douglas": the practice of a suave but vague
"spiritual" rhetoric that gives many people the illusion they are
somehow getting more than they are willing to pay for in the cold
cash of commitment. I am reminded of an incident when Mr. Nehru
visited this country last Fall: at a private reception he was being
asked questions from the floor when one voice, shaking with emotion,
exclaimed, "Mr. Nehru, we intellectuals in America want you to
know how much Gandhi means to us." The words gave me some–
thing of a turn, for I recognized the speaker, a young New York
literatus,
and I could not help thinking that this young man smoked
.and drank, and, so far as I can guess, practiced contraception. How,
