ABSTRACT
My third Lecture I propose to devote to the consideration of some attempts to satisfy those deeply rooted demands of human nature which have throughout the history of our race led to the framing of religious systems without depressing the dignity and impairing the independence of that nature by the acknowledgment of its subordination to a Being possessing in a higher degree than itself the attributes of reason and freedom which are its prerogatives among the inhabitants of this planet. Although not peculiar to the present age, such attempts may fairly be said to be characteristic of it. Impatience not of any particular authority, but of authority as such is, I think, unmistakably a feature of the feeling and thought of the generation which regards itself as, in the phrase of the day, “post-war”; although the future historian of ideas will certainly find that this turn of thought was already evident before the outbreak of the World War, however much that great upheaval may have made it more general and determined its subsequent form. This generation does not appeal from human authority to divine or from that of a monarch or aristocracy to that of a People; it does not set up the crown against the mitre, or the mitre against the crown: but rather it claims to have been, like Dante in the Earthly Paradise “crowned and mitred over itself.” 1
