The Religion of a Sceptic

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. John Cowper Powys launches a provocative defense of Christianity's imaginative power by attacking the sterile battle between Fundamentalists and Modernists. Through the perspective of a reflective visitor moving between an old church and a fashionable "modern" one, he contrasts inherited worship's quiet dignity with reform's theatrical distractions, arguing that faith matters less as doctrine than as cultural memory, ritual, and emotional inheritance. For Powys, the skeptic who has lost belief may still understand religion best, because unbelief can reveal the poetry hidden in dogma, liturgy, and sacred observance. He treats Christianity as a vast mythic atmosphere shaped by centuries of feeling, not as a system to be proved. The Virgin Birth, Resurrection, Atonement, and Trinity are valued for their beauty, mystery, and power to organize human experience, while modern liberal abstractions like the "Fatherhood of God" seem thin beside medieval Christianity's dramatic richness. The Mass stands at the center of this vision: a centuries-old act of shared pity and consolation that can move even the doubter. In Powys's Shakespearean blend of skepticism and reverence, Christ becomes one of humanity's greatest artistic creations, sanctifying ordinary life and giving Western culture a lasting sense of awe, sorrow, and transcendence.