The Unknown God

By Alfred Noyes The Unknown God is the odyssey of Alfred Noyes from the impoverishment of doubt and error to the magnificence of faith and truth. Abandoning his childhood Protestantism for agnosticism, Noyes still adhered to a tenuous notion of a “Supreme Being.” Through the pages of the reigning rationalist writers of his time, he pursued an answer to that question of God’s existence. Yet the bare result was the mere acknowledgement of a great “Unknown” anchoring the system. At last, after much searching and suffering, did he find in the profuse light of the Catholic faith the “key to the riddle” and the “resolution to the discord.” As I was passing along and noticing the objects of your worship, I found also an altar bearing the inscription, to the unknown god. What therefore you worship in ignorance, that I proclaim to you. (Acts 17:23) Modern man, Noyes argues, needs some “fundamental belief with which [he] can confront, on equal terms, the vast universe opened up to them by mode