Is this belief that Jesus is one’s daily companion just a psychological device then? I very much doubt it. In any event, it is most unwise to be condescending about other people’s beliefs. Jesus’ precept, “Judge not, that ye be not judged”, is sound psychological advice. Even if you think it is only a device, either for an individual or generally, it is better not to say so. You may be wrong; and if you are, and if there is a Deity, He is unlikely to forgive you in a hurry. And even if it is a device, it is a perfectly legitimate device.
If it is legitimate to regard Jesus as one’s daily companion, then it is equally legitimate to regard another person, or indeed other people as one’s daily companions, no matter whether they are present or absent, alive or dead. And before the reader throws up his hands in horror, and say that this means telepathy and dabbling in the occult, let me remind him that every soldier would agree that comradeship and morale is all, and regimental spirit is the basis of morale! And it was this knowledge that emboldened me to write that I believed the supreme reality is a sense of communion between two persons or two souls. Nine tenths of it may be fantasy and imagination, but the remaining tenth hidden under all the chaff is adamantine spirit. Even if there is a good deal of fantasy in Christian communion; regimental morale is not fantasy. And it is important to try to discover where the truth lies.
At the beginning of one of Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s books on military strategy there is a most eloquent passage on the need to pursue the truth in writing military history. Captain Liddell Hart was an infantry officer in the 1914/18 War; he was badly wounded, and invalided out of the Army in 1919, much against his will. However he went on to become a distinguished military historian; and he wrote that one must pursue the truth, in disregard of patriotism, in disregard of loyalty to regiment, in disregard of loyalty to friends alive or dead. Because if one does not, the history one writes is worthless. So I will try to pursue the truth, and be as delicate as I can.
In my “Reconciliation with Science and War” it is the philosophical aspect of my theory of consciousness that predominates, with the assertion that for us to think at all, we have to adopt an attitude of mind under tension, which rests on assumptions which for the most part are unconscious, and which almost certainly contain a degree of error. So error creeps into all our thinking from the start; with the well known experience that carrying an argument through to its logical conclusion often results in contradiction or absurdity. You need to have the discretion to know when to stop. Of course I insisted that all this took place in the world of relationships; but I did not explain how. In “Man’s Relationship with God” it is practical experience that predominates, with the assertion that the only beliefs the mind really believes are the ones you put into practice every day; and intellectual beliefs to which the mind only pays lip-service are so pale and shadowy by comparison that they hardly merit the name “belief” at all.