But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.

For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary.

Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.

And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.

Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.