Anyone with even the slightest religious consciousnes must be afflicted from time to time by the contrast between his religious faith and his behaviour; anyone with the taste that individual or group culture confers must be aware of values which he cannot call religious.
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The actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything else. There are always bits and traces of more primitive faiths more or less absorbed; there is always the tendency towards parasitic beliefs; there are always perversions, as when patriotism, which pertains to natural religion and is therefore licit and even encouraged by the Church, becomes exaggerated into a caricature of itself.
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That behaviour is also belief, and that even the most conscious and developed of us live also at the level on which belief and behaviour cannot be distinguished, is one that may, once we allow our imagination to play upon, be very disconcerting. It gives importance to even our most trivial pursuits, to the occupation of our every minute, which we canot contemplate long without the horror of nightmare.
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It is inconvenient for Christians to find that as Christians they do not believe enough, and that on the other hand they, with everybody else, believe in too many things.
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For what a people may be said to believe, as what is shown by their behaviour, is, as I have said, always a great deal more and a great deal less than its professed faith in its purity.
Thanks.
