The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

believe that this pessimism had any metaphysical
cause. Its causes were war, poverty, and violence.
One of Mr Krutch’s most pathetic chapters deals
with the subject of love. It appears that the
Victorians thought very highly of it, but that we
with our modern sophistication have come to see
through it.
‘For the more skeptical of the Victorians, love
performed some of the functions of the God whom
they had lost. Faced with it, many of even the most
hard-headed turned, for the moment; mystical. They
found themselves in the presence of something
which awoke in them that sense of reverence
which nothing else claimed, and something to
which they felt, even in the very depth of their
being, that an unquestioning loyalty was due. For
them love, like God, demanded all sacrifices; but
like Him, also, it rewarded the believer by
investing all the phenomena of life with a meaning
not yet analysed away. We have grown used -
more than they - to a Godless universe, but we are