Here was the key for which he had always been searching! The key to the mystery of faith. The faith that would persist in believing, despite all disillusionment, that round the next corner it would find the Real and the Good. The gods of men's worship were not things in themselves, but the creations of the created -- the forms under which man represented to himself his ineffable Creator and Sustainer, the form changing as man's power of understanding increased. The forms did not matter; peppery old Jehovah with his long white beard and golden crown could go into the discard without anybody being damned; and, equally, those who liked him could go on worshipping him still, without being damned either. You could help yourself to the kind of god that suited you, so long as you realised that he was only a dramatisation. The real thing was behind all the gods, and no man had ever dramatised It. On your head be it if you made yourself a nasty god that liked blood-sacrifices; or a silly god, who wanted to make a pink sugar confectioner's heaven of this tough old earth. The nearer you got to the facts in your conception of God, the better for you, but no man's concept had ever been the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, nor ever would be. When he reached that stage he would just quietly pass out and go free. God was the Absolute, whatever that might mean. Murchison shrewdly suspected it meant nothing. Anyway, it was no use to the average human brain, which needed bulk to work on, same as the intestines. It had to have images and a story.
-From the editor's partly-unglued copy of Dion Fortune's 1936 novel, The Winged Bull
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