A Preface to Morals > Chapter III. The Loss of Certainty > What Modernism Leaves Out
Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more powerful than all the kings of earth put together, if they really believed that not only their actions but their secret thoughts were known and would be remembered by the creator and ultimate judge of the universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients to attract an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed professed was invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come to church, as they usually do to-day, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music. They would come to worship God.
Religious professions will not work when they rest merely on a kind of passive assent; or on intricate reasoning, or on fierce exhortation, or on a good-natured conspiracy to be vague and highflown. A man cannot cheat about faith. Either he has it in the marrow of his bones, or in a crisis, when he is distracted and in sorrow, there is no conviction there to support him. Without complete certainty religion does not offer genuine consolation. It is without the strength to compensate our weakness. Nor can it sanction the rules of morality. Ethical codes cannot lay claim to unhesitating obedience when they are based upon the opinions of a majority, or on the notions of wise men, or on estimates of what is socially useful, or on an appeal to patriotism. For they depend then on the force which happens to range itself behind them at a particular time; or on their convenience for a moment. They are felt to be the outcome of human, and therefore quite fallible, decisions. They are no necessary part of the government of the universe. They were not given by God to Moses on Sinai. They are not the commandments of God speaking through his Infallible Church.
A human morality has no such sanction as a divine. The sanction of a divine morality is the certainty of the believer that it originated with God. But if he has once come to think that the rule of conduct has a purely human, local, and temporal origin, its sanction is gone. His obedience is transformed, as ours has been by knowledge of that sort, from conviction to conformity or calculated expediency.
Without certainty there can be no profound sense that a man's own purpose has become part of the purpose of the whole creation. It is necessary to believe in a God who is active in the world before a man can feel himself to be, as St. Paul said, "a fellow laborer" with God. Yet this sense of partnership with a Person who transcends the individual's own life, his own ego, and his own capacities, is fundamental in all popular religion. It underlies all the other elements of religion. For in the certainty that he is enlisted with God, man finds not only comfort in defeat, not only an ideal of holiness which persuades him to renounce his immediate desires, but an ecstatic mobilizing of all his scattered energies in one triumphant sense of his own infinite importance.