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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+*************************************************************
+THERE IS AN IMPROVED HTML EDITION OF THIS TITLE WITH A LINKED
+TABLE OF CONTENTS WHICH MAY BE VIEWED AS EBOOK (# 16769) at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16769
+*************************************************************
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+
+
+
+Title: Orthodoxy
+
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+
+Release Date: May, 1994  [eBook #130]
+[Most recently updated: September 26, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY***
+
+
+This etext was proofread by Martin Ward and compared against a separate
+copy scanned by Mike Perry.
+
+
+
+ORTHODOXY
+
+by
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+     This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to
+put the positive side in addition to the negative.  Many critics
+complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised
+current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.
+This book is an attempt to answer the challenge.  It is unavoidably
+affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical.  The writer has
+been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset
+Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical
+only in order to be sincere.  While everything else may be different
+the motive in both cases is the same.  It is the purpose of the writer
+to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can
+be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.
+The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle
+and its answer.  It deals first with all the writer's own solitary
+and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in
+which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology.
+The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed.  But if
+it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.
+
+                                           Gilbert K. Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   I.  Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
+  II.  The Maniac
+ III.  The Suicide of Thought
+  IV.  The Ethics of Elfland
+   V.  The Flag of the World
+  VI.  The Paradoxes of Christianity
+ VII.  The Eternal Revolution
+VIII.  The Romance of Orthodoxy
+  IX.  Authority and the Adventurer
+
+
+
+
+
+ORTHODOXY
+
+
+
+I INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE
+
+
+     THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer
+to a challenge.  Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
+When some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers,
+under the name of "Heretics," several critics for whose intellect
+I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G.S.Street)
+said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm
+his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my
+precepts with example.  "I will begin to worry about my philosophy,"
+said Mr. Street, "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his."
+It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person
+only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.
+But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book,
+he need not read it.  If he does read it, he will find that in
+its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set
+of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state
+the philosophy in which I have come to believe.  I will not call it
+my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it;
+and it made me.
+
+     I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
+yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
+under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
+I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
+write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
+of philosophical illustration.  There will probably be a general
+impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
+by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
+turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
+I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.  But if you
+imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
+was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
+with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
+of this tale.  His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
+and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.  What could
+be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the
+fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane
+security of coming home again?  What could be better than to have
+all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting
+necessity of landing there?  What could be more glorious than to
+brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize,
+with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.
+This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is
+in a manner the main problem of this book.  How can we contrive
+to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
+How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens,
+with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us
+at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour
+of being our own town?
+
+     To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every
+standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger
+book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument;
+and this is the path that I here propose to follow.  I wish to set
+forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need,
+the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar
+which Christendom has rightly named romance.  For the very word
+"romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.
+Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by
+saying what he does not dispute.  Beyond stating what he proposes
+to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.
+The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take
+as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this
+desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full
+of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always
+seems to have desired.  If a man says that extinction is better
+than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure,
+then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking.
+If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.  But nearly all
+people I have ever met in this western society in which I live
+would agree to the general proposition that we need this life
+of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange
+with something that is secure.  We need so to view the world as to
+combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.  We need to be
+happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.
+It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in
+these pages.
+
+     But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in
+a yacht, who discovered England.  For I am that man in a yacht.
+I discovered England.  I do not see how this book can avoid
+being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth)
+how it can avoid being dull.  Dulness will, however, free me from
+the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.
+Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of
+all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing
+of which I am generally accused.  I know nothing so contemptible
+as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.
+If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived
+upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire;
+for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every
+six minutes.  It is as easy as lying; because it is lying.
+The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the
+fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth.
+I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.  I never in my life
+said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course,
+I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny
+because I had said it.  It is one thing to describe an interview
+with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist.
+It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist
+and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.
+One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively
+the more extraordinary truths.  And I offer this book with the
+heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write,
+and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor
+clowning or a single tiresome joke.
+
+     For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me.
+I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been
+discovered before.  If there is an element of farce in what follows,
+the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I
+was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.
+It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.
+No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself;
+no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him:
+I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from
+my throne.  I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end
+of the nineteenth century.  I did, like all other solemn little boys,
+try to be in advance of the age.  Like them I tried to be some ten
+minutes in advance of the truth.  And I found that I was eighteen
+hundred years behind it.  I did strain my voice with a painfully
+juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths.  And I was punished
+in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths:
+but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that
+they were not mine.  When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
+in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
+It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
+but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
+of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from
+the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
+the first to find Europe.  I did try to found a heresy of my own;
+and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
+was orthodoxy.
+
+     It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account
+of this happy fiasco.  It might amuse a friend or an enemy to
+read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend
+or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I
+might have learnt from my catechism--if I had ever learnt it.
+There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I
+found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I
+might have found in the nearest parish church.  If any one is
+entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the
+phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains
+of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain
+conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book.
+But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour.
+I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
+
+     I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note
+naturally should, at the beginning of the book.  These essays are
+concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian
+theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the
+best root of energy and sound ethics.  They are not intended
+to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question
+of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation
+of that creed.  When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means
+the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself
+Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic
+conduct of those who held such a creed.  I have been forced by
+mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed;
+I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians,
+of where we ourselves got it.  This is not an ecclesiastical treatise
+but a sort of slovenly autobiography.  But if any one wants my
+opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G.S.Street
+has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.
+
+
+
+II THE MANIAC
+
+
+     Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world;
+they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
+Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made
+a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a
+motto of the modern world.  Yet I had heard it once too often,
+and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.  The publisher
+said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."
+And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught
+an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell."  I said to him,
+"Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?
+For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more
+colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know where flames the fixed
+star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of
+the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in
+lunatic asylums."  He said mildly that there were a good many men after
+all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.
+"Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them.
+That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
+he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from
+whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
+If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly
+individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself
+is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.  Actors who can't
+act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay.  It would
+be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he
+believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin;
+complete self-confidence is a weakness.  Believing utterly in one's
+self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in
+Joanna Southcote:  the man who has it has `Hanwell' written on his
+face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."  And to all this
+my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply,
+"Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"
+After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer
+to that question."  This is the book that I have written in answer
+to it.
+
+     But I think this book may well start where our argument started--
+in the neighbourhood of the mad-house. Modern masters of science are
+much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact.
+The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with
+that necessity.  They began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical
+as potatoes.  Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous
+waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.
+But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists,
+have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water,
+but to deny the indisputable dirt.  Certain new theologians dispute
+original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can
+really be proved.  Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in
+their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness,
+which they cannot see even in their dreams.  But they essentially
+deny human sin, which they can see in the street.  The strongest
+saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the
+starting-point of their argument.  If it be true (as it certainly is)
+that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat,
+then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions.
+He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he
+must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
+The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution
+to deny the cat.
+
+     In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible
+(with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did,
+with the fact of sin.  This very fact which was to them (and is to me)
+as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially
+diluted or denied.  But though moderns deny the existence of sin,
+I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a
+lunatic asylum.  We all agree still that there is a collapse of
+the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house.  Men deny hell,
+but not, as yet, Hanwell.  For the purpose of our primary argument
+the one may very well stand where the other stood.  I mean that as
+all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended
+to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern
+thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make
+a man lose his wits.
+
+     It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity
+as in itself attractive.  But a moment's thought will show that if
+disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease.
+A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see
+the picture.  And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can
+only be enjoyed by the sane.  To the insane man his insanity is
+quite prosaic, because it is quite true.  A man who thinks himself
+a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.  A man who thinks
+he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass.
+It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which
+makes him mad.  It is only because we see the irony of his idea
+that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see
+the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all.  In short,
+oddities only strike ordinary people.  Oddities do not strike
+odd people.  This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time;
+while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
+This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old
+fairy tales endure for ever.  The old fairy tale makes the hero
+a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling;
+they startle him because he is normal.  But in the modern
+psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.
+Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately,
+and the book is monotonous.  You can make a story out of a hero
+among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.  The fairy
+tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.  The sober
+realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will
+do in a dull world.
+
+     Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic
+inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey.  Now, if we are
+to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the
+matter is to blot out one big and common mistake.  There is a notion
+adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination,
+is dangerous to man's mental balance.  Poets are commonly spoken of as
+psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association
+between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it.
+Facts and history utterly contradict this view.  Most of the very
+great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like;
+and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much
+the safest man to hold them.  Imagination does not breed insanity.
+Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.  Poets do not go mad;
+but chess-players do.  Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers;
+but creative artists very seldom.  I am not, as will be seen,
+in any sense attacking logic:  I only say that this danger does
+lie in logic, not in imagination.  Artistic paternity is as
+wholesome as physical paternity.  Moreover, it is worthy of remark
+that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had
+some weak spot of rationality on his brain.  Poe, for instance,
+really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he
+was specially analytical.  Even chess was too poetical for him;
+he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles,
+like a poem.  He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts,
+because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.
+Perhaps the strongest case of all is this:  that only one great English
+poet went mad, Cowper.  And he was definitely driven mad by logic,
+by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.  Poetry was not
+the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.
+He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his
+hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and
+the white flat lilies of the Ouse.  He was damned by John Calvin;
+he was almost saved by John Gilpin.  Everywhere we see that men
+do not go mad by dreaming.  Critics are much madder than poets.
+Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him
+into extravagant tatters.  Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only
+some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.
+And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in
+his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
+The general fact is simple.  Poetry is sane because it floats
+easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea,
+and so make it finite.  The result is mental exhaustion,
+like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein.  To accept everything
+is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.  The poet only
+desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in.
+The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.  It is the logician
+who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head
+that splits.
+
+     It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking
+mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation.  We have
+all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius
+is to madness near allied."  But Dryden did not say that great genius
+was to madness near allied.  Dryden was a great genius himself,
+and knew better.  It would have been hard to find a man more romantic
+than he, or more sensible.  What Dryden said was this, "Great wits
+are oft to madness near allied"; and that is true.  It is the pure
+promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown.
+Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking.
+He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or
+George Herbert.  He was talking of a cynical man of the world,
+a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician.  Such men
+are indeed to madness near allied.  Their incessant calculation
+of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade.
+It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind.  A flippant
+person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter."  A more flippant
+person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure
+the human head.
+
+     And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true
+that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.  When I was engaged
+in a controversy with the CLARION on the matter of free will,
+that able writer Mr. R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy,
+because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic
+would be causeless.  I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse
+in determinist logic.  Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's,
+can be causeless, determinism is done for.  If the chain of
+causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
+But my purpose is to point out something more practical.
+It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not
+know anything about free will.  But it was certainly remarkable that
+a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics.
+Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics.
+The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions
+are causeless.  If any human acts may loosely be called causeless,
+they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks;
+slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing
+his hands.  It is the happy man who does the useless things;
+the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.  It is exactly such
+careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand;
+for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause
+in everything.  The madman would read a conspiratorial significance
+into those empty activities.  He would think that the lopping
+of the grass was an attack on private property.  He would think
+that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice.
+If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would
+become sane.  Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people
+in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their
+most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting
+of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.
+If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will
+get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker
+for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
+He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb
+certainties of experience.  He is the more logical for losing certain
+sane affections.  Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this
+respect a misleading one.  The madman is not the man who has lost
+his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except
+his reason.
+
+     The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often
+in a purely rational sense satisfactory.  Or, to speak more strictly,
+the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;
+this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds
+of madness.  If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy
+against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men
+deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators
+would do.  His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.
+Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no
+complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad;
+for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the
+existing authorities to do.  Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ,
+it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity;
+for the world denied Christ's.
+
+     Nevertheless he is wrong.  But if we attempt to trace his error
+in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.
+Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this:
+that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle
+is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite
+as infinite, it is not so large.  In the same way the insane explanation
+is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.
+A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.
+There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such
+a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many
+modern religions.  Now, speaking quite externally and empirically,
+we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness
+is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual
+contraction.  The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things,
+but it does not explain them in a large way.  I mean that if you
+or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be
+chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air,
+to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside
+the suffocation of a single argument.  Suppose, for instance,
+it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were
+the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him.
+If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal
+against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this:
+"Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart,
+and that many things do fit into other things as you say.  I admit
+that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it
+leaves out!  Are there no other stories in the world except yours;
+and are all men busy with your business?  Suppose we grant the details;
+perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was
+only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it
+was only because he knew it already.  But how much happier you would
+be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you!
+How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller
+in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity
+and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their
+sunny selfishness and their virile indifference!  You would begin
+to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.
+You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your
+own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself
+under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."
+Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who
+claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right!
+Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care?
+Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look
+down on all the kings of the earth."  Or it might be the third case,
+of the madman who called himself Christ.  If we said what we felt,
+we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world:
+but what a small world it must be!  What a little heaven you must inhabit,
+with angels no bigger than butterflies!  How sad it must be to be God;
+and an inadequate God!  Is there really no life fuller and no love
+more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful
+pity that all flesh must put its faith?  How much happier you would be,
+how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God
+could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles,
+and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well
+as down!"
+
+     And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science
+does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it
+like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.  Neither modern
+science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.
+Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous.
+Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid.  For example,
+some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking
+about sex.  The new scientific society definitely discourages men from
+thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.
+And in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania,
+modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish.
+In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth;
+he must desire health.  Nothing can save him but a blind hunger
+for normality, like that of a beast.  A man cannot think himself
+out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has
+become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can
+only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves,
+it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his
+logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner
+Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs
+the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.
+Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.
+Every remedy is a desperate remedy.  Every cure is a miraculous cure.
+Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting
+out a devil.  And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go
+to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant--
+as intolerant as Bloody Mary.  Their attitude is really this:
+that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.
+Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation.  If thy HEAD
+offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter
+the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile,
+rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell--
+or into Hanwell.
+
+     Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner,
+frequently a successful reasoner.  Doubtless he could be vanquished
+in mere reason, and the case against him put logically.  But it can
+be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms.
+He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea:  he is
+sharpened to one painful point.  He is without healthy hesitation
+and healthy complexity.  Now, as I explain in the introduction,
+I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much
+a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view.  And I
+have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason:
+that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most
+modern thinkers.  That unmistakable mood or note that I hear
+from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats
+of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors
+in more senses than one.  They all have exactly that combination we
+have noted:  the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason
+with a contracted common sense.  They are universal only in the
+sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far.
+But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern.
+They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved
+with it, it is still white on black.  Like the lunatic, they cannot
+alter their standpoint; they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly
+see it black on white.
+
+     Take first the more obvious case of materialism.  As an explanation
+of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.  It has
+just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense
+of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
+Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance,
+Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.
+He understands everything, and everything does not seem
+worth understanding.  His cosmos may be complete in every rivet
+and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
+Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious
+of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth;
+it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting
+peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea.
+The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small.
+The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
+
+     It must be understood that I am not now discussing the relation
+of these creeds to truth; but, for the present, solely their relation
+to health.  Later in the argument I hope to attack the question of
+objective verity; here I speak only of a phenomenon of psychology.
+I do not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel that materialism
+is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought
+he was Christ that he was labouring under an error.  I merely remark
+here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness
+and the same kind of incompleteness.  You can explain a man's
+detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it
+is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy.
+The explanation does explain.  Similarly you may explain the order
+in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men,
+are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree--
+the blind destiny of matter.  The explanation does explain,
+though not, of course, so completely as the madman's. But the point
+here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both,
+but feels to both the same objection.  Its approximate statement
+is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much
+of a god.  And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the
+real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.  The thing has shrunk.
+The deity is less divine than many men; and (according to Haeckel)
+the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial
+than many separate aspects of it.  The parts seem greater than
+the whole.
+
+
+     For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether
+true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion.
+In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow.
+They cannot be broader than themselves.  A Christian is only
+restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted.
+He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian;
+and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be
+an atheist.  But as it happens, there is a very special sense
+in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism.
+Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe
+in determinism.  I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not
+allowed to believe in fairies.  But if we examine the two vetoes we
+shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine.
+The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable
+amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe.
+But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine
+the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.  Poor Mr. McCabe
+is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be
+hiding in a pimpernel.  The Christian admits that the universe is
+manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he
+is complex.  The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast,
+a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen.
+Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
+But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as
+the madman is quite sure he is sane.  The materialist is sure
+that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation,
+just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that
+he is simply and solely a chicken.  Materialists and madmen never
+have doubts.
+
+     Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do
+materialistic denials.  Even if I believe in immortality I need not think
+about it.  But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it.
+In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like;
+in the second the road is shut.  But the case is even stronger,
+and the parallel with madness is yet more strange.  For it was our
+case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that,
+right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity.  Now it is the charge
+against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong,
+they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness,
+I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.
+For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it
+generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense
+a liberating force.  It is absurd to say that you are especially
+advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.
+The determinists come to bind, not to loose.  They may well call
+their law the "chain" of causation.  It is the worst chain that ever
+fettered a human being.  You may use the language of liberty,
+if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this
+is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when
+applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like,
+that the man is free to think himself a poached egg.  But it is
+surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg
+he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette.
+Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist
+speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will.
+But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not
+free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish,
+to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions,
+to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you"
+for the mustard.
+
+     In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer
+fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way
+favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or
+punishments of any kind.  This is startlingly the reverse of the truth.
+It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference
+at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend
+exhorting as before.  But obviously if it stops either of them it
+stops the kind exhortation.  That the sins are inevitable does not
+prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion.
+Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain
+to lead to cowardice.  Determinism is not inconsistent with the
+cruel treatment of criminals.  What it is (perhaps) inconsistent
+with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to
+their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle.
+The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does
+believe in changing the environment.  He must not say to the sinner,
+"Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it.  But he
+can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.
+Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic
+outline of the figure of the madman.  Both take up a position
+at once unanswerable and intolerable.
+
+     Of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true.
+The same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic.
+There is a sceptic far more terrible than he who believes that
+everything began in matter.  It is possible to meet the sceptic
+who believes that everything began in himself.  He doubts not the
+existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows.
+For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself.
+He created his own father and his own mother.  This horrible
+fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat
+mystical egoism of our day.  That publisher who thought that men
+would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after
+the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass,
+those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead
+of creating life for the world, all these people have really only
+an inch between them and this awful emptiness.  Then when this
+kindly world all round the man has been blackened out like a lie;
+when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail;
+then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone
+in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto shall
+be written over him in avenging irony.  The stars will be only dots
+in the blackness of his own brain; his mother's face will be only
+a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell.
+But over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, "He believes
+in himself."
+
+
+     All that concerns us here, however, is to note that this
+panegoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the
+other extreme of materialism.  It is equally complete in theory
+and equally crippling in practice.  For the sake of simplicity,
+it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe
+that he is always in a dream.  Now, obviously there can be no positive
+proof given to him that he is not in a dream, for the simple reason
+that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream.
+But if the man began to burn down London and say that his housekeeper
+would soon call him to breakfast, we should take him and put him
+with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in
+the course of this chapter.  The man who cannot believe his senses,
+and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane,
+but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument,
+but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.  They have both
+locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun
+and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the
+health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health
+and happiness of the earth.  Their position is quite reasonable;
+nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny
+bit is infinitely circular.  But there is such a thing as a mean
+infinity, a base and slavish eternity.  It is amusing to notice
+that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken
+as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol
+of this ultimate nullity.  When they wish to represent eternity,
+they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth.  There is
+a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal.
+The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the
+eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists
+and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented
+by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.
+
+     This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what
+actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say
+in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void.
+The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad;
+he begins to think at the wrong end.  And for the rest of these pages
+we have to try and discover what is the right end.  But we may ask
+in conclusion, if this be what drives men mad, what is it that keeps
+them sane?  By the end of this book I hope to give a definite,
+some will think a far too definite, answer.  But for the moment it
+is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general
+answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.
+Mysticism keeps men sane.  As long as you have mystery you have health;
+when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.  The ordinary man has
+always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.
+He has permitted the twilight.  He has always had one foot in earth
+and the other in fairyland.  He has always left himself free to doubt
+his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe
+in them.  He has always cared more for truth than for consistency.
+If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other,
+he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.
+His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight:
+he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better
+for that.  Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing
+as fate, but such a thing as free will also.  Thus he believed
+that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless
+ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth.  He admired youth
+because it was young and age because it was not.  It is exactly
+this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole
+buoyancy of the healthy man.  The whole secret of mysticism is this:
+that man can understand everything by the help of what he does
+not understand.  The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid,
+and succeeds in making everything mysterious.  The mystic allows
+one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
+The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear,
+and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid.
+The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because
+of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and
+crystal clearness.  He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness;
+but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.
+As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness,
+we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and
+of health.  Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal:
+it breaks out.  For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature;
+but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger
+or smaller.  But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision
+and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without
+altering its shape.  Because it has a paradox in its centre it can
+grow without changing.  The circle returns upon itself and is bound.
+The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free
+travellers.
+
+     Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this
+deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
+sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind.
+The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in
+the light of which we look at everything.  Like the sun at noonday,
+mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own
+victorious invisibility.  Detached intellectualism is (in the
+exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light
+without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.
+But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of
+imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry
+and the patron of healing.  Of necessary dogmas and a special creed
+I shall speak later.  But that transcendentalism by which all men
+live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky.
+We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion;
+it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and
+a blur.  But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable,
+as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard.
+For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother
+of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
+
+
+
+III THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT
+
+
+     The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle:
+for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for
+a definition.  Phrases like "put out" or "off colour" might have
+been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision.
+And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase
+about a man having "his heart in the right place."  It involves the
+idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist,
+but it is rightly related to other functions.  Indeed, the negation
+of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid
+mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns.
+If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character
+of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly
+than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart;
+but not a heart in the right place.  And this is so of the typical
+society of our time.
+
+     The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern
+world is far too good.  It is full of wild and wasted virtues.
+When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered
+at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose.
+The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.
+But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander
+more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.  The modern
+world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues
+have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other
+and are wandering alone.  Thus some scientists care for truth;
+and their truth is pitiless.  Thus some humanitarians only care
+for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
+For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad
+on one Christian virtue:  the merely mystical and almost irrational
+virtue of charity.  He has a strange idea that he will make it
+easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive.
+Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only
+early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions.
+For in his case the pagan accusation is really true:  his mercy
+would mean mere anarchy.  He really is the enemy of the human race--
+because he is so human.  As the other extreme, we may take
+the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all
+human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart.
+Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth.
+Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.
+But in Torquemada's time there was at least a system that could
+to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other.
+Now they do not even bow.  But a much stronger case than these two of
+truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation
+of humility.
+
+     It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned.
+Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance
+and infinity of the appetite of man.  He was always outstripping
+his mercies with his own newly invented needs.  His very power
+of enjoyment destroyed half his joys.  By asking for pleasure,
+he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.
+Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large,
+he must be always making himself small.  Even the haughty visions,
+the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations
+of humility.  Giants that tread down forests like grass are
+the creations of humility.  Towers that vanish upwards above
+the loneliest star are the creations of humility.  For towers
+are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants
+unless they are larger than we.  All this gigantesque imagination,
+which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom
+entirely humble.  It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything--
+even pride.
+
+     But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.
+Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled
+upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.
+A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about
+the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part
+of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not
+to assert--himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he
+ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason.  Huxley preached a humility
+content to learn from Nature.  But the new sceptic is so humble
+that he doubts if he can even learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we
+had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.
+The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time;
+but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility
+than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was
+a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot
+that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man
+doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.
+But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make
+him stop working altogether.
+
+     At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic
+and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong.  Every day one
+comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not
+be the right one.  Of course his view must be the right one,
+or it is not his view.  We are on the road to producing a race
+of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
+We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity
+as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too
+proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.
+The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek
+even to claim their inheritance.  It is exactly this intellectual
+helplessness which is our second problem.
+
+     The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:
+that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from
+his reason than his imagination.  It was not meant to attack the
+authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it.
+For it needs defence.  The whole modern world is at war with reason;
+and the tower already reels.
+
+     The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle
+of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they
+cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.
+They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical
+in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern
+latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion
+not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never
+been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis,
+they cannot even see its historical cause.  Religious authority
+has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as
+every legal system (and especially our present one) has been
+callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack
+the police; nay, it is glorious.  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.
+It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.
+Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert
+that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are
+merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
+"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?
+Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?
+They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
+The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."
+But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right
+to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all."
+
+     There is a thought that stops thought.  That is the only thought
+that ought to be stopped.  That is the ultimate evil against which
+all religious authority was aimed.  It only appears at the end of
+decadent ages like our own:  and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its
+ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called
+"Doubts of the Instrument."  In this he questions the brain itself,
+and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions,
+past, present, and to come.  But it was against this remote ruin
+that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked
+and ruled.  The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the
+horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said,
+for the suppression of reason.  They were organized for the difficult
+defence of reason.  Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once
+things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.
+The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define
+the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify:  these were all only dark
+defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable,
+more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think.
+We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.
+For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities,
+and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.
+In so far as religion is gone, reason is going.  For they are both
+of the same primary and authoritative kind.  They are both methods
+of proof which cannot themselves be proved.  And in the act of
+destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed
+the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.
+With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre
+off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.
+
+     Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps
+desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern
+fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself.
+Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have
+some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be
+very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think
+about.  But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful.  In
+some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is
+generally called evolution.
+
+     Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which,
+if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either
+an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things
+came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack
+upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not
+destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply means that
+a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive
+thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox;
+for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly,
+especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.
+But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such
+thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him
+to change into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing.
+At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything
+and anything.  This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon
+the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.
+You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.
+Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist
+reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I
+cannot think."
+
+     Then there is the opposite attack on thought:  that urged by
+Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique,"
+and there are no categories at all.  This also is merely destructive.
+Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.
+It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought
+necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without
+contradicting it.  Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere),
+"All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement,
+but a contradiction in terms.  If all chairs were quite different,
+you could not call them "all chairs."
+
+     Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains
+that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.
+We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age
+is wrong in another."  This is quite reasonable, if it means that
+there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain
+times and not at other times.  If women, say, desire to be elegant,
+it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and
+at another time by growing thinner.  But you cannot say that they
+are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish
+to be oblong.  If the standard changes, how can there be improvement,
+which implies a standard?  Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that
+men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so,
+we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.
+How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction?
+You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being
+miserable than another succeeded in being happy.  It would be
+like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig
+is fat.
+
+     It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his
+object or ideal.  But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.
+If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must
+be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt
+gaily with the ideal of monotony.  Progress itself cannot progress.
+It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather
+weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society,
+he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
+He wrote--
+
+     "Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
+of change."
+
+He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
+Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can
+get into.
+
+     The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
+alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought
+about the past or future simply impossible.  The theory of a
+complete change of standards in human history does not merely
+deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives
+us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.
+
+     This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our
+time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism;
+for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the
+pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme
+application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.
+My meaning can be put shortly thus.  I agree with the pragmatists
+that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there
+is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary
+to the human mind.  But I say that one of those necessities
+precisely is a belief in objective truth.  The pragmatist tells
+a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
+But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.
+This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.  Pragmatism is
+a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs
+is to be something more than a pragmatist.  Extreme pragmatism
+is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
+The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be
+a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.
+The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense
+of the human sense of actual fact.
+
+     To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most
+characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania,
+but a touch of suicidal mania.  The mere questioner has knocked
+his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
+This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the
+boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.
+What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is
+the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought.  It is vain
+for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will
+happen if wild scepticism runs its course.  It has run its course.
+It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that
+will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen
+it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
+You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men
+ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more
+sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.
+It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly
+and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application
+of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence
+that modern England is Christian.  But it would have reached the
+bankruptcy anyhow.  Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted;
+but rather because they are an old minority than because they
+are a new one.  Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.
+It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker now hails
+philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
+Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was
+just in time to see it set.  If any frightened curate still says
+that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread,
+we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc,
+"Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces
+already in dissolution.  You have mistaken the hour of the night:
+it is already morning."  We have no more questions left to ask.
+We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the
+wildest peaks.  We have found all the questions that can be found.
+It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking
+for answers.
+
+     But one more word must be added.  At the beginning of this
+preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has
+been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination.  A man
+does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he
+may go mad by thinking it out in square inches.  Now, one school
+of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing
+the pagan health of the world.  They see that reason destroys;
+but Will, they say, creates.  The ultimate authority, they say,
+is in will, not in reason.  The supreme point is not why
+a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.
+I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
+It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
+that is called egoism.  That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
+for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it.  To preach
+anything is to give it away.  First, the egoist calls life a war
+without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
+drill his enemies in war.  To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
+But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature.
+The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers;
+they are makers.  They say that choice is itself the divine thing.
+Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts
+are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness.
+He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will.
+He does not say, "Jam will make me happy," but "I want jam."
+And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.
+Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited
+about it that he is obliged to write prose.  He publishes a short
+play with several long prefaces.  This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw,
+for all his plays are prefaces:  Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man
+on earth who has never written any poetry.  But that Mr. Davidson (who
+can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics
+in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine
+of will has taken hold of men.  Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken
+in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker,
+but like an artist, saying, "I FEEL this curve is right," or "that
+line SHALL go thus."  They are all excited; and well they may be.
+For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they
+can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism.  They think they
+can escape.
+
+     But they cannot escape.  This pure praise of volition ends
+in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic.
+Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself,
+so the acceptation of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will.
+Mr. Bernard Shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old
+utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated)
+and that which he propounds.  The real difference between the test
+of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of
+happiness is a test and the other isn't. You can discuss whether
+a man's act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness;
+you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.  Of course
+it was.  You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated
+to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul.
+But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say
+that is merely to say that it is an action.  By this praise of will
+you cannot really choose one course as better than another.  And yet
+choosing one course as better than another is the very definition
+of the will you are praising.
+
+     The worship of will is the negation of will.  To admire mere
+choice is to refuse to choose.  If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and
+says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind
+what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in
+the matter."  You cannot admire will in general, because the essence
+of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John
+Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore
+he invokes will--will to anything.  He only wants humanity to want
+something. But humanity does want something.  It wants ordinary
+morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or
+anything. But we have willed something.  We have willed the law
+against which he rebels.
+
+     All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson,
+are really quite empty of volition.  They cannot will, they can
+hardly wish.  And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found
+quite easily.  It can be found in this fact:  that they always talk
+of will as something that expands and breaks out.  But it is quite
+the opposite.  Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To
+desire action is to desire limitation.  In that sense every act
+is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject
+everything else.  That objection, which men of this school used
+to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.
+Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion.  Just as when
+you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take
+one course of action you give up all the other courses.  If you
+become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton.
+If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon.
+It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that
+makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little
+better than nonsense.  For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us
+to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious
+that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries
+of "I will."  "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and thou shalt
+not stop me."  Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists,
+and care for no laws or limits.  But it is impossible to be
+an artist and not care for laws and limits.  Art is limitation;
+the essence of every picture is the frame.  If you draw a giraffe,
+you must draw him with a long neck.  If, in your bold creative way,
+you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck,
+you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.
+The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world
+of limits.  You can free things from alien or accidental laws,
+but not from the laws of their own nature.  You may, if you like,
+free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
+Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump:  you may be freeing him
+from being a camel.  Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles
+to break out of the prison of their three sides.  If a triangle
+breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.
+Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles";
+I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved,
+they were loved for being triangular.  This is certainly the case
+with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most
+decisive example of pure will.  The artist loves his limitations:
+they constitute the THING he is doing.  The painter is glad
+that the canvas is flat.  The sculptor is glad that the clay
+is colourless.
+
+     In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate
+it.  The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing,
+because the Jacobins willed something definite and limited.
+They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes
+of democracy.  They wished to have votes and NOT to have titles.
+Republicanism had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre
+as well as an expansive side in Danton or Wilkes.  Therefore they
+have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square
+social equality and peasant wealth of France.  But since then the
+revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by
+shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal.
+Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.  Men have tried
+to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb.
+The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against,
+but (what was more important) the system he would NOT rebel against,
+the system he would trust.  But the new rebel is a Sceptic,
+and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no loyalty; therefore he
+can never be really a revolutionist.  And the fact that he doubts
+everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.
+For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the
+modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces,
+but the doctrine by which he denounces it.  Thus he writes one book
+complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women,
+and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he
+insults it himself.  He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose
+their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.
+As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life,
+and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.
+A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant,
+and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the
+peasant ought to have killed himself.  A man denounces marriage
+as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating
+it as a lie.  He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the
+oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.
+The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he
+complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he
+takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting,
+where he proves that they practically are beasts.  In short,
+the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always
+engaged in undermining his own mines.  In his book on politics he
+attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he
+attacks morality for trampling on men.  Therefore the modern man
+in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.
+By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel
+against anything.
+
+     It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed
+in all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire.
+Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted
+superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
+When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some
+distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard
+of Greek sculpture.  They are appealing to the marble Apollo.
+And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is
+an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle
+to be fierce about.  Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm:
+he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something
+bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not
+any mass of common morality behind it.  He is himself more preposterous
+than anything he denounces.  But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very
+well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence.
+The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not
+a physical accident.  If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility,
+Nietzscheism would end in imbecility.  Thinking in isolation
+and with pride ends in being an idiot.  Every man who will
+not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
+
+     This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism,
+and therefore in death.  The sortie has failed.  The wild worship of
+lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void.
+Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately
+in Tibet.  He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing
+and Nirvana.  They are both helpless--one because he must not
+grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything.
+The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all
+special actions are evil.  But the Nietzscheite's will is quite
+equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good;
+for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.
+They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and
+the other likes all the roads.  The result is--well, some things
+are not hard to calculate.  They stand at the cross-roads.
+
+     Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business
+of this book--the rough review of recent thought.  After this I
+begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader,
+but which, at any rate, interests me.  In front of me, as I close
+this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning
+over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.
+By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash
+of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw,
+as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from
+a balloon.  They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.
+For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach
+mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.  He who
+thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought;
+for glass cannot think.  So he who wills to reject nothing,
+wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice
+of something, but the rejection of almost everything.  And as I
+turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless
+modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye.  It is called
+"Jeanne d'Arc," by Anatole France.  I have only glanced at it,
+but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan's "Vie de Jesus."
+It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic.  It discredits
+supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling
+natural stories that have no foundation.  Because we cannot believe
+in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what
+he felt.  But I do not mention either book in order to criticise it,
+but because the accidental combination of the names called up two
+startling images of Sanity which blasted all the books before me.
+Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting
+all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.
+She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.  Yet Joan,
+when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in
+Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.
+I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain
+things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth,
+the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back.
+Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she
+endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a
+typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.  And then I thought
+of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche,
+and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.
+I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger
+for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.  Well, Joan of Arc
+had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not
+praise fighting, but fought.  We KNOW that she was not afraid
+of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.
+Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant.  Nietzsche only
+praised the warrior; she was the warrior.  She beat them both at
+their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one,
+more violent than the other.  Yet she was a perfectly practical person
+who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.
+It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she
+and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility
+that has been lost.  And with that thought came a larger one,
+and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre
+of my thoughts.  The same modern difficulty which darkened the
+subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan.
+Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity.
+Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere
+nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.
+As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for
+humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity!  Altruists, with thin,
+weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.  Egoists (with
+even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.
+In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough.
+The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.
+The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.
+There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect
+the fragments.  There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped
+arms and legs walking about.  They have torn the soul of Christ
+into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are
+equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.
+They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they
+have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top
+throughout.
+
+
+
+IV THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND
+
+
+     When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it
+is commonly in some such speech as this:  "Ah, yes, when one is young,
+one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;
+but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down
+to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has
+and getting on with the world as it is."  Thus, at least, venerable and
+philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me
+when I was a boy.  But since then I have grown up and have discovered
+that these philanthropic old men were telling lies.  What has really
+happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen.
+They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the
+methods of practical politicians.  Now, I have not lost my ideals
+in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was.
+What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.
+I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon;
+but I am not so much concerned about the General Election.
+As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention
+of it.  No; the vision is always solid and reliable.  The vision
+is always a fact.  It is the reality that is often a fraud.
+As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism.
+But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.
+
+     I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because,
+having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation,
+this may be counted, I think, as the only positive bias.
+I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy,
+in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity.
+If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause
+for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I
+mean it, can be stated in two propositions.  The first is this:
+that the things common to all men are more important than the
+things peculiar to any men.  Ordinary things are more valuable
+than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.
+Man is something more awful than men; something more strange.
+The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid
+to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization.
+The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more
+heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature.
+Death is more tragic even than death by starvation.  Having a nose
+is more comic even than having a Norman nose.
+
+     This is the first principle of democracy:  that the essential
+things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things
+they hold separately.  And the second principle is merely this:
+that the political instinct or desire is one of these things
+which they hold in common.  Falling in love is more poetical than
+dropping into poetry.  The democratic contention is that government
+(helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love,
+and not a thing like dropping into poetry.  It is not something
+analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum,
+discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop,
+being Astronomer Royal, and so on.  For these things we do not wish
+a man to do at all unless he does them well.  It is, on the contrary,
+a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing
+one's own nose.  These things we want a man to do for himself,
+even if he does them badly.  I am not here arguing the truth of any
+of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have
+their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking,
+for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses.  I merely
+say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions,
+and that democracy classes government among them.  In short,
+the democratic faith is this:  that the most terribly important things
+must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes,
+the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.  This is democracy;
+and in this I have always believed.
+
+     But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been
+able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people
+got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.
+It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.
+It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to
+some isolated or arbitrary record.  The man who quotes some German
+historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance,
+is strictly appealing to aristocracy.  He is appealing to the
+superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.
+It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated,
+more respectfully than a book of history.  The legend is generally
+made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane.
+The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.
+Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant
+may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement
+that voters in the slums are ignorant.  It will not do for us.
+If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great
+unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason
+why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.
+Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
+Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes,
+our ancestors.  It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses
+to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely
+happen to be walking about.  All democrats object to men being
+disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their
+being disqualified by the accident of death.  Democracy tells us
+not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom;
+tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is
+our father.  I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy
+and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea.
+We will have the dead at our councils.  The ancient Greeks voted
+by stones; these shall vote by tombstones.  It is all quite regular
+and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked
+with a cross.
+
+     I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was
+always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition.
+Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content
+to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more
+inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe
+that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.
+I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see
+life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people
+who see life from the outside.  I would always trust the old wives'
+fables against the old maids' facts.  As long as wit is mother wit it
+can be as wild as it pleases.
+
+     Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend
+to no training in such things.  I propose to do it, therefore,
+by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental
+ideas which I have found for myself, pretty much in the way
+that I found them.  Then I shall roughly synthesise them,
+summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then I
+shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had
+been discovered before.  It had been discovered by Christianity.
+But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount in order,
+the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition.
+And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and
+democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear.  As it is,
+I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.
+
+     My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with
+unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.  I generally learnt it
+from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess
+at once of democracy and tradition.  The things I believed most then,
+the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.
+They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things.  They are
+not fantasies:  compared with them other things are fantastic.
+Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal,
+though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
+Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.
+It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth;
+so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland,
+but elfland that criticised the earth.  I knew the magic beanstalk
+before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I
+was certain of the moon.  This was at one with all popular tradition.
+Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook;
+but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists,
+and talked about the gods of brook and bush.  That is what the moderns
+mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate Nature,"
+because they said that Nature was divine.  Old nurses do not
+tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance
+on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for
+the dryads.
+
+     But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being
+fed on fairy tales.  If I were describing them in detail I could
+note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them.
+There is the chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants
+should be killed because they are gigantic.  It is a manly mutiny
+against pride as such.  For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms,
+and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite.  There is the
+lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat--
+EXALTAVIT HUMILES.  There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast";
+that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable.  There is the
+terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human
+creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death;
+and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.  But I am
+not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with
+the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak,
+and shall retain when I cannot write.  I am concerned with a certain
+way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales,
+but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.
+
+     It might be stated this way.  There are certain sequences
+or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are,
+in the true sense of the word, reasonable.  They are, in the true
+sense of the word, necessary.  Such are mathematical and merely
+logical sequences.  We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable
+of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity.
+For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella,
+it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is
+younger than the Ugly Sisters.  There is no getting out of it.
+Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases:
+it really must be.  If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is
+the father of Jack.  Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne:
+and we in fairyland submit.  If the three brothers all ride horses,
+there are six animals and eighteen legs involved:  that is true
+rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.  But as I put my head over
+the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world,
+I observed an extraordinary thing.  I observed that learned men
+in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened--
+dawn and death and so on--as if THEY were rational and inevitable.
+They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY
+as the fact that two and one trees make three.  But it is not.
+There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is
+the test of the imagination.  You cannot IMAGINE two and one not
+making three.  But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit;
+you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging
+on by the tail.  These men in spectacles spoke much of a man
+named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law.
+But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law,
+a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling.  If the apple hit
+Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple.  That is a true necessity:
+because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other.
+But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose;
+we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose,
+of which it had a more definite dislike.  We have always in our fairy
+tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations,
+in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts,
+in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions.  We believe
+in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities.  We believe
+that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all
+confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans
+make five.
+
+     Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the
+nursery tales.  The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple
+will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up
+to the other.  The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn,
+and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it
+were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
+Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many
+castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason.
+She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental
+connection between a horn and a falling tower.  But the scientific
+men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental
+connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching
+the ground.  They do really talk as if they had found not only
+a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts.
+They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically
+connected them philosophically.  They feel that because one
+incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible
+thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing.
+Two black riddles make a white answer.
+
+     In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science
+they are singularly fond of it.  Thus they will call some interesting
+conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet,
+Grimm's Law.  But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than
+Grimm's Fairy Tales.  The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales;
+while the law is not a law.  A law implies that we know the nature
+of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed
+some of the effects.  If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go
+to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection
+between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets.
+And we know what the idea is.  We can say why we take liberty
+from a man who takes liberties.  But we cannot say why an egg can
+turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn
+into a fairy prince.  As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further
+off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in
+itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears.
+Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential
+that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales,
+not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws of Nature."
+When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn,
+we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer
+if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes
+fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC.
+It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula.
+It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening
+practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen.
+It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we
+count on the ordinary course of things.  We do not count on it;
+we bet on it.  We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we
+do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet.
+We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore
+an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore
+an exception.  All the terms used in the science books, "law,"
+"necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual,
+because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess.
+The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the
+terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment."
+They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
+A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree.  Water runs downhill
+because it is bewitched.  The sun shines because it is bewitched.
+
+     I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical.
+We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language
+about things is simply rational and agnostic.  It is the only way
+I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one
+thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical
+connection between flying and laying eggs.  It is the man who
+talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.
+Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist.
+He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked
+and swept away by mere associations.  He has so often seen birds
+fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy,
+tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none.
+A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love;
+so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide.
+In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
+them together.  A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell
+of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own,
+it reminded him of his boyhood.  So the materialist professor (though
+he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark
+association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples.  But the
+cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract,
+the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in
+his country.
+
+     This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived
+from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy
+tales is derived from this.  Just as we all like love tales because
+there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because
+they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.
+This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children
+we do not need fairy tales:  we only need tales.  Mere life is
+interesting enough.  A child of seven is excited by being told that
+Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.  But a child of three is excited
+by being told that Tommy opened a door.  Boys like romantic tales;
+but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic.
+In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom
+a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.
+This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal
+leap of interest and amazement.  These tales say that apples were
+golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they
+were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember,
+for one wild moment, that they run with water.  I have said that this
+is wholly reasonable and even agnostic.  And, indeed, on this point
+I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance.
+We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances,
+the story of the man who has forgotten his name.  This man walks
+about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he
+cannot remember who he is.  Well, every man is that man in the story.
+Every man has forgotten who he is.  One may understand the cosmos,
+but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
+Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
+We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten
+our names.  We have all forgotten what we really are.  All that we
+call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism
+only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget
+that we have forgotten.  All that we call spirit and art and
+ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that
+we forget.
+
+     But though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the
+streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration.
+It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin.
+The wonder has a positive element of praise.  This is the next
+milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland.
+I shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists
+in their intellectual aspect, so far as they have one.  Here I am only
+trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described.
+And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it
+was puzzling.  It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure;
+it was an adventure because it was an opportunity.  The goodness
+of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be
+more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale.
+The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
+though I hardly knew to whom.  Children are grateful when Santa
+Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets.  Could I
+not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift
+of two miraculous legs?  We thank people for birthday presents
+of cigars and slippers.  Can I thank no one for the birthday present
+of birth?
+
+     There were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and
+indisputable.  The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking;
+existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise.  In fact,
+all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck
+in my brain from boyhood.  The question was, "What did the first
+frog say?"  And the answer was, "Lord, how you made me jump!"
+That says succinctly all that I am saying.  God made the frog jump;
+but the frog prefers jumping.  But when these things are settled
+there enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy.
+
+     Any one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales"
+or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang.  For the pleasure
+of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy.
+Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics
+all virtue is in an "if."  The note of the fairy utterance always is,
+"You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say
+the word `cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter,
+if you do not show her an onion."  The vision always hangs upon a veto.
+All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small
+thing withheld.  All the wild and whirling things that are let
+loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden.  Mr. W.B.Yeats,
+in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry, describes the elves
+as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses
+of the air--
+
+     "Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,      And dance
+upon the mountains like a flame."
+
+It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B.Yeats does not
+understand fairyland.  But I do say it.  He is an ironical Irishman,
+full of intellectual reactions.  He is not stupid enough to
+understand fairyland.  Fairies prefer people of the yokel type
+like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told.
+Mr. Yeats reads into elfland all the righteous insurrection of his
+own race.  But the lawlessness of Ireland is a Christian lawlessness,
+founded on reason and justice.  The Fenian is rebelling against
+something he understands only too well; but the true citizen of
+fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all.
+In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an
+incomprehensible condition.  A box is opened, and all evils fly out.
+A word is forgotten, and cities perish.  A lamp is lit, and love
+flies away.  A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.
+An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
+
+     This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not
+lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny
+may think it liberty by comparison.  People out of Portland
+Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove
+that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty.
+Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers.
+Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out
+of nowhere, but she received a command--which might have come out
+of Brixton--that she should be back by twelve.  Also, she had a
+glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common
+a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle,
+that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror;
+they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones.
+For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact
+that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most
+easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat.  And this fairy-tale sentiment
+also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world.
+I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond,
+but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were
+compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder.
+I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.
+
+     Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to
+be perishable.  Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant;
+simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.
+Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth;
+the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any
+moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should
+not do.  Now, the point here is that to ME this did not seem unjust.
+If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I
+must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might
+fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace."
+If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?"
+her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there
+till twelve?"  If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants
+and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions
+partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift.  He must not look
+a winged horse in the mouth.  And it seemed to me that existence
+was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain
+of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did
+not understand the vision they limited.  The frame was no stranger
+than the picture.  The veto might well be as wild as the vision;
+it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters,
+as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.
+
+     For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy)
+I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they
+called the general sentiment of REVOLT.  I should have resisted,
+let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their
+definition I shall deal in another chapter.  But I did not feel
+disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious.
+Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick
+or the payment of a peppercorn:  I was willing to hold the huge
+estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy.  It could not
+well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.
+At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.
+I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation
+against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and
+unexpected as sex itself.  To be allowed, like Endymion, to make
+love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own
+moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's)
+a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for
+so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be
+married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
+It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one
+was talking.  It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex,
+but a curious insensibility to it.  A man is a fool who complains
+that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.  Polygamy is a lack
+of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears
+in mere absence of mind.  The aesthetes touched the last insane
+limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things.  The thistledown
+made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.
+Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason,
+that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any
+sort of symbolic sacrifice.  Men (I felt) might fast forty days
+for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing.  Men might go through fire
+to find a cowslip.  Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep
+sober for the blackbird.  They would not go through common Christian
+marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip.  Surely one might
+pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals.  Oscar Wilde said
+that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets.
+But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets.  We can pay for them
+by not being Oscar Wilde.
+
+     Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery,
+and I have not found any books so sensible since.  I left the
+nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found
+any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative.
+But the matter for important comment was here:  that when I
+first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world,
+I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points
+to my nurse and to the nursery tales.  It has taken me a long time
+to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.
+The really curious thing was this:  that modern thought contradicted
+this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines.
+I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions;
+first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might
+have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second,
+that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and
+submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.  But I
+found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both
+my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden
+and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which,
+crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.
+
+     First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism;
+saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded
+without fault from the beginning.  The leaf on the tree is green
+because it could never have been anything else.  Now, the fairy-tale
+philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it
+might have been scarlet.  He feels as if it had turned green an
+instant before he looked at it.  He is pleased that snow is white
+on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black.
+Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden
+roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood.
+He feels that something has been DONE.  But the great determinists
+of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native
+feeling that something had happened an instant before.  In fact,
+according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning
+of the world.  Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened;
+and even about the date of that they were not very sure.
+
+     The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism,
+for the necessity of things being as they are.  But when I came
+to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable
+repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated.
+Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird
+than more rational.  It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped
+nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then
+seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape.  I should have
+fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society.
+So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having
+trunks looked like a plot.  I speak here only of an emotion,
+and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle.  But the repetition
+in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of
+an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.
+The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once;
+the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood.  The sun would
+make me see him if he rose a thousand times.  The recurrences of the
+universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began
+to see an idea.
+
+     All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind
+rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption.  It is
+supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead;
+a piece of clockwork.  People feel that if the universe was personal
+it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.  This is a
+fallacy even in relation to known fact.  For the variation in human
+affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death;
+by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.
+A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure
+or fatigue.  He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking;
+or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.  But if his life
+and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington,
+he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
+The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness
+of death.  The sun rises every morning.  I do not rise every morning;
+but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
+Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that
+the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
+His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush
+of life.  The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children,
+when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.  A child
+kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.
+Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit
+fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.
+They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it
+again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong
+enough to exult in monotony.  But perhaps God is strong enough
+to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning,
+"Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.
+It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
+it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
+of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
+for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
+The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be
+a theatrical ENCORE.  Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg.
+If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead
+of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not
+be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose.
+It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they
+admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
+human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
+Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at
+any instant it may stop.  Man may stand on the earth generation
+after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last
+appearance.
+
+     This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish
+emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely
+felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful:
+now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they
+were WILFUL.  I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises
+of some will.  In short, I had always believed that the world
+involved magic:  now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.
+And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious;
+that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose,
+there is a person.  I had always felt life first as a story:
+and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
+
+     But modern thought also hit my second human tradition.
+It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions.
+The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.
+Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had
+called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable
+that nobody did.  But he was an imperialist of the lowest type.
+He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar
+system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.  Why should
+a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to
+a whale?  If mere size proves that man is not the image of God,
+then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image;
+what one might call an impressionist portrait.  It is quite futile
+to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was
+always small compared to the nearest tree.  But Herbert Spencer,
+in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some
+way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe.
+He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent
+Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals.  He turned mankind
+into a small nationality.  And his evil influence can be seen even
+in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors;
+notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G.Wells. Many moralists
+have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked.
+But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift
+up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.
+
+     But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this.
+I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison;
+in the prison of one thought.  These people seemed to think it
+singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large.
+The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief.
+The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation
+could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance,
+such as forgiveness or free will.  The grandeur or infinity
+of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it.  It was like
+telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear
+that the gaol now covered half the county.  The warder would
+have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors
+of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human.
+So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except
+more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns
+and empty of all that is divine.
+
+     In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken,
+for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.
+But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could
+not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery.
+We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.
+The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither
+have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them.
+The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and
+airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet.
+This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast,
+but it is not free.  One went into larger and larger windowless rooms,
+rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest
+window or a whisper of outer air.
+
+     Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance;
+but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance.
+So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my
+emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that
+the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected.
+According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had
+one unbroken rule.  Only (they would say) while it is one thing,
+it is also the only thing there is.  Why, then, should one worry
+particularly to call it large?  There is nothing to compare it with.
+It would be just as sensible to call it small.  A man may say,
+"I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd
+of varied creatures."  But if it comes to that why should not a
+man say, "I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number
+of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see"?
+One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments.
+It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth;
+it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger
+than it is.  A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness
+of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about
+its smallness?
+
+     It happened that I had that emotion.  When one is fond of
+anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant
+or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge,
+that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small.
+If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail,
+then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable.  But the
+moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman.
+The moment you really see an elephant you can call it "Tiny."
+If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it.
+These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing;
+but they were not fond of the universe.  But I was frightfully fond
+of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive.  I often
+did so; and it never seemed to mind.  Actually and in truth I did feel
+that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling
+the world small than by calling it large.  For about infinity there
+was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious
+care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life.
+They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift.
+For economy is far more romantic than extravagance.  To them stars
+were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun
+and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and
+one shilling.
+
+     These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour
+and tone of certain tales.  Thus I have said that stories of magic
+alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a
+kind of eccentric privilege.  I may express this other feeling of
+cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
+"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes
+its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry
+of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence.  Crusoe is a man
+on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea:
+the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from
+the wreck.  The greatest of poems is an inventory.  Every kitchen
+tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.
+It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day,
+to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think
+how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship
+on to the solitary island.  But it is a better exercise still
+to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape:
+everything has been saved from a wreck.  Every man has had one
+horrible adventure:  as a hidden untimely birth he had not been,
+as infants that never see the light.  Men spoke much in my boyhood
+of restricted or ruined men of genius:  and it was common to say
+that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more
+solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great
+Might-Not-Have-Been.
+
+     But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order
+and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship.
+That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there
+were two guns and one axe.  It was poignantly urgent that none should
+be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.
+The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck:
+and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked
+in the confusion.  I felt economical about the stars as if they were
+sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills.
+For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant
+to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is
+literally true.  This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:
+for there cannot be another one.
+
+     Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the
+unutterable things.  These are my ultimate attitudes towards life;
+the soils for the seeds of doctrine.  These in some dark way I
+thought before I could write, and felt before I could think:
+that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate
+them now.  I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not
+explain itself.  It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation;
+it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.
+But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me,
+will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard.
+The thing is magic, true or false.  Second, I came to feel as if magic
+must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.
+There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
+whatever it meant it meant violently.  Third, I thought this
+purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
+such as dragons.  Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it
+is some form of humility and restraint:  we should thank God
+for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.  We owed,
+also, an obedience to whatever made us.  And last, and strangest,
+there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some
+way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some
+primordial ruin.  Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods:
+he had saved them from a wreck.  All this I felt and the age gave me
+no encouragement to feel it.  And all this time I had not even thought
+of Christian theology.
+
+
+
+V THE FLAG OF THE WORLD
+
+
+     When I was a boy there were two curious men running about
+who were called the optimist and the pessimist.  I constantly used
+the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any
+very special idea of what they meant.  The only thing which might
+be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said;
+for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought
+this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought
+it as bad as it could be.  Both these statements being obviously
+raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations.
+An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and
+nothing wrong.  For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything
+right and nothing left.  Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion
+that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist,
+and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
+It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious
+but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl,
+"An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
+is a man who looks after your feet."  I am not sure that this is not
+the best definition of all.  There is even a sort of allegorical truth
+in it.  For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn
+between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact
+with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker
+who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice
+of road.
+
+     But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist
+and the pessimist.  The assumption of it is that a man criticises
+this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown
+over a new suite of apartments.  If a man came to this world from
+some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss
+whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage
+of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance
+the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view.
+But no man is in that position.  A man belongs to this world before
+he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it.  He has fought for
+the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he
+has ever enlisted.  To put shortly what seems the essential matter,
+he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.
+
+     In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling
+that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed
+in fairy tales.  The reader may, if he likes, put down the next
+stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly
+comes next in the history of a boy.  We all owe much sound morality
+to the penny dreadfuls.  Whatever the reason, it seemed and still
+seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed
+in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism
+and approval.  My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
+it is more like patriotism.  It is a matter of primary loyalty.
+The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to
+leave because it is miserable.  It is the fortress of our family,
+with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it
+is the less we should leave it.  The point is not that this world
+is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that
+when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it,
+and its sadness a reason for loving it more.  All optimistic thoughts
+about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike
+reasons for the English patriot.  Similarly, optimism and pessimism
+are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
+
+     Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say
+Pimlico.  If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find
+the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the
+arbitrary.  It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in
+that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor,
+certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then
+it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of
+it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a
+transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a
+man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and
+golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when
+she is loved.  For decoration is not given to hide horrible things:
+but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her
+child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it.  A lover does not
+give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as
+mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a
+year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that
+this is a mere fantasy.  I answer that this is the actual history of
+mankind.  This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great.  Go back to
+the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round
+some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well.  People first paid
+honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it.  Men did not love
+Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
+
+     The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have
+been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far
+as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government
+an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.
+But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men
+had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange
+of interests.  Morality did not begin by one man saying to another,
+"I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace
+of such a transaction.  There IS a trace of both men having said,
+"We must not hit each other in the holy place."  They gained their
+morality by guarding their religion.  They did not cultivate courage.
+They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous.
+They did not cultivate cleanliness.  They purified themselves for
+the altar, and found that they were clean.  The history of the Jews
+is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can
+be judged sufficiently from that.  The Ten Commandments which have been
+found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands;
+a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across
+a certain desert.  Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity.
+And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made
+a holiday for men.
+
+     If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing
+is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact.
+Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort
+of universal patriotism.  What is the matter with the pessimist?
+I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot.
+And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated,
+without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend.
+And what is the matter with the candid friend?  There we strike
+the rock of real life and immutable human nature.
+
+     I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend
+is simply that he is not candid.  He is keeping something back--
+his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.  He has
+a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help.  This is certainly,
+I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to
+healthy citizens.  I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism
+which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses;
+that is only patriotism speaking plainly.  A man who says that
+no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not
+worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son
+should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
+But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men,
+and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested:
+he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry
+to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all.  And he may be said,
+without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge
+which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people
+from joining it.  Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a
+military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant.
+Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot)
+uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away
+the people from her flag.  Granted that he states only facts, it is
+still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive.
+It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox;
+but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher
+who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants
+to help the men.
+
+     The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods
+and men, but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not
+this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.  What is the evil
+of the man commonly called an optimist?  Obviously, it is felt
+that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world,
+will defend the indefensible.  He is the jingo of the universe;
+he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong."  He will be less inclined
+to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench
+official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances.
+He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world.  All this
+(which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really
+interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained
+without it.
+
+     We say there must be a primal loyalty to life:  the only
+question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty?
+If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an
+unreasonable loyalty?  Now, the extraordinary thing is that the
+bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything)
+comes in with the reasonable optimism.  Rational optimism leads
+to stagnation:  it is irrational optimism that leads to reform.
+Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism.
+The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly
+the man who loves it with a reason.  The man who will improve
+the place is the man who loves it without a reason.  If a man loves
+some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself
+defending that feature against Pimlico itself.  But if he simply loves
+Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem.
+I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the
+mystic patriot who reforms.  Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest
+among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism.
+The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England.
+If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success
+with which we rule the Hindoos.  But if we love it only for being
+a nation, we can face all events:  for it would be a nation even
+if the Hindoos ruled us.  Thus also only those will permit their
+patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history.
+A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose.
+But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against
+all facts for his fancy.  He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman)
+by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest.
+He may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason.  A man who
+loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870.
+But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army
+of 1870.  This is exactly what the French have done, and France is
+a good instance of the working paradox.  Nowhere else is patriotism
+more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more
+drastic and sweeping.  The more transcendental is your patriotism,
+the more practical are your politics.
+
+     Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case
+of women; and their strange and strong loyalty.  Some stupid people
+started the idea that because women obviously back up their own
+people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not
+see anything.  They can hardly have known any women.  The same women
+who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in
+their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid
+about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head.
+A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is:  his wife loves him
+and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.  Women who are
+utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism.
+Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
+who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong
+as a man.  She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value.
+The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely
+be a sceptic.  Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is.
+Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
+
+     This at least had come to be my position about all that
+was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement.  Before any
+cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance.
+A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested
+in his views of it.  "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must
+be fixed on the right thing:  the moment we have a fixed heart we
+have a free hand.  I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism.
+It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed
+of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance.
+But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective.
+It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those
+quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous
+than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--
+
+"Enough we live:--and if a life, With large results so little rife,
+Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain
+of birth."
+
+     I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes
+our epoch.  For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution,
+what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise,
+but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.
+We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a
+surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
+We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle,
+to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return
+at evening.
+
+     No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world:
+but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength
+enough to get it on.  Can he hate it enough to change it,
+and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?  Can he look
+up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence?
+Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair?
+Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist,
+but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?  Is he enough of a
+pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?
+In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails,
+the irrational optimist who succeeds.  He is ready to smash the whole
+universe for the sake of itself.
+
+     I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as
+they came:  and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident
+of the time.  Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument
+arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self.
+Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow,"
+of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person,
+and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.
+Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there
+would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill
+himself for a penny.  In all this I found myself utterly hostile
+to many who called themselves liberal and humane.  Not only is
+suicide a sin, it is the sin.  It is the ultimate and absolute evil,
+the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take
+the oath of loyalty to life.  The man who kills a man, kills a man.
+The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned
+he wipes out the world.  His act is worse (symbolically considered)
+than any rape or dynamite outrage.  For it destroys all buildings:
+it insults all women.  The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
+but the suicide is not:  that is his crime.  He cannot be bribed,
+even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City.  The thief
+compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.
+But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.
+He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.
+There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death
+is not a sneer.  When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves
+might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury:
+for each has received a personal affront.  Of course there may be
+pathetic emotional excuses for the act.  There often are for rape,
+and there almost always are for dynamite.  But if it comes to clear
+ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much
+more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads
+and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal
+automatic machines.  There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart.
+The man's crime is different from other crimes--for it makes even
+crimes impossible.
+
+     About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker:
+he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr.  The open
+fallacy of this helped to clear the question.  Obviously a suicide
+is the opposite of a martyr.  A martyr is a man who cares so much
+for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.
+A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him,
+that he wants to see the last of everything.  One wants something
+to begin:  the other wants everything to end.  In other words,
+the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world
+or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life;
+he sets his heart outside himself:  he dies that something may live.
+The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being:
+he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.
+And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer
+fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.
+For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
+Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason,
+of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate
+and pessimistic.  The early Christian martyrs talked of death
+with a horrible happiness.  They blasphemed the beautiful duties
+of the body:  they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.
+All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism.  Yet there
+is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of
+the pessimist.
+
+     This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which
+Christianity entered the discussion.  And there went with it a
+peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note
+of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.
+The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is
+so often affirmed in modern morals.  It was not a matter of degree.
+It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the
+self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer
+in sadness just beyond it.  The Christian feeling evidently
+was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.
+The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against
+the other:  these two things that looked so much alike were at
+opposite ends of heaven and hell.  One man flung away his life;
+he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence.
+Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would
+pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right;
+but why was it so fierce?
+
+     Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were
+in some beaten track.  Christianity had also felt this opposition
+of the martyr to the suicide:  had it perhaps felt it for the
+same reason?  Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not
+(and cannot) express--this need for a first loyalty to things,
+and then for a ruinous reform of things?  Then I remembered
+that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it
+combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine.
+Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being
+too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic
+about the world.  The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.
+
+     An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying
+that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot
+be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible
+in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.
+You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed
+on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well
+say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three,
+but not suitable to half-past four.  What a man can believe
+depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.
+If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe
+in any miracle in any age.  If a man believes in a will behind law,
+he can believe in any miracle in any age.  Suppose, for the sake
+of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing.
+A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more
+than a materialist of the twentieth century.  But a Christian
+Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a
+Christian of the twelfth century.  It is simply a matter of a man's
+theory of things.  Therefore in dealing with any historical answer,
+the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it
+was given in answer to our question.  And the more I thought about
+when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt
+that it had actually come to answer this question.
+
+     It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay
+quite indefensible compliments to Christianity.  They talk as if
+there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came,
+a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them.
+They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
+was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness
+and sincerity.  They will think me very narrow (whatever that means)
+if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
+was the first to preach Christianity.  Its peculiarity was that it
+was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar,
+but obvious ideals for all mankind.  Christianity was the answer
+to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.
+Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone
+this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma
+(as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones),
+turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.
+Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
+specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would
+be an exaggeration.  But it would be very much nearer to the truth.
+The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people
+who did believe in the Inner Light.  Their dignity, their weariness,
+their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care
+for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only
+by that dismal illumination.  Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists,
+as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done
+or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make
+a moral revolution.  He gets up early in the morning, just as our
+own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning;
+because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games
+of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land.
+Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types.  He is an
+unselfish egoist.  An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without
+the excuse of passion.  Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment
+the worst is what these people call the Inner Light.  Of all horrible
+religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.
+Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows
+any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work.
+That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately
+to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.  Let Jones worship the sun
+or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship
+cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not
+the god within.  Christianity came into the world firstly in order
+to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
+but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm
+a divine company and a divine captain.  The only fun of being
+a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light,
+but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as
+the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
+
+     All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun
+and moon.  If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them;
+to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn
+insects alive.  He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke,
+he may give his neighbour measles.  He thinks that because the moon
+is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad.  This ugly side
+of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world.
+About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the
+weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had
+begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism.  Nature worship
+is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words,
+Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan.
+But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow
+in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he
+soon showed the cloven hoof.  The only objection to Natural Religion
+is that somehow it always becomes unnatural.  A man loves Nature
+in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall,
+if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.
+He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics,
+yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot
+bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.  The mere pursuit of
+health always leads to something unhealthy.  Physical nature must
+not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed,
+not worshipped.  Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously.
+If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended.
+Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties.
+Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.
+Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination.
+The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything
+that was bad.
+
+     On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented
+by the old remnant of the Stoics.  Marcus Aurelius and his friends
+had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked
+only to the god within.  They had no hope of any virtue in nature,
+and hardly any hope of any virtue in society.  They had not enough
+interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it.
+They did not love the city enough to set fire to it.  Thus the
+ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma.  The only
+people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up;
+and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock
+them down.  In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly
+stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually
+accepted as THE answer.  It was the answer then, and I think it is
+the answer now.
+
+     This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered;
+it did not in any sense sentimentally unite.  Briefly, it divided
+God from the cosmos.  That transcendence and distinctness of the
+deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity,
+was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian.
+It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist
+and the still more unhappy optimist.  As I am here only concerned
+with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this
+great metaphysical suggestion.  All descriptions of the creating
+or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they
+must be verbal.  Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God
+in all things as if he were in a box.  Thus the evolutionist has,
+in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet.
+All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge.
+The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
+with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things.
+I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would
+not talk about evolution.  And the root phrase for all Christian
+theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
+A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it
+as a little thing he has "thrown off."  Even in giving it forth he
+has flung it away.  This principle that all creation and procreation
+is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the
+evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out.  A woman
+loses a child even in having a child.  All creation is separation.
+Birth is as solemn a parting as death.
+
+     It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that
+this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet
+from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
+description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.
+According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.
+According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.
+God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he
+had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human
+actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
+I will discuss the truth of this theorem later.  Here I have only
+to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma
+we have discussed in this chapter.  In this way at least one could
+be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self to be either
+a pessimist or an optimist.  On this system one could fight all
+the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence.
+One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with
+the world.  St. George could still fight the dragon, however big
+the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the
+mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills.  If he were as
+big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world.
+St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in
+the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design.
+He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything;
+even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its
+open jaws.
+
+     And then followed an experience impossible to describe.
+It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two
+huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without
+apparent connection--the world and the Christian tradition.
+I had found this hole in the world:  the fact that one must
+somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it;
+somehow one must love the world without being worldly.  I found this
+projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike,
+the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world
+separate from Himself.  The spike of dogma fitted exactly into
+the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--
+and then the strange thing began to happen.  When once these two
+parts of the two machines had come together, one after another,
+all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude.
+I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling
+into its place with a kind of click of relief.  Having got one
+part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude,
+as clock after clock strikes noon.  Instinct after instinct was
+answered by doctrine after doctrine.  Or, to vary the metaphor,
+I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take
+one high fortress.  And when that fort had fallen the whole country
+surrendered and turned solid behind me.  The whole land was lit up,
+as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood.  All those blind
+fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain
+to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane.
+I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice:
+it was the divine choice.  I was right when I felt that I would
+almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must
+by necessity have been that colour:  it might verily have been
+any other.  My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a
+condition did mean something when all was said:  it meant the whole
+doctrine of the Fall.  Even those dim and shapeless monsters of
+notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
+stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides
+of the creed.  The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void,
+but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything
+that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist;
+to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
+And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to
+be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--
+even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for,
+according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck,
+the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of
+the world.
+
+     But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed
+the reason for optimism.  And the instant the reversal was made it
+felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket.
+I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident
+blasphemy of pessimism.  But all the optimism of the age had been
+false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been
+trying to prove that we fit in to the world.  The Christian
+optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world.
+I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal,
+like any other which sought its meat from God.  But now I really
+was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity.  I had been
+right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse
+and better than all things.  The optimist's pleasure was prosaic,
+for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian
+pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything
+in the light of the supernatural.  The modern philosopher had told
+me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still
+felt depressed even in acquiescence.  But I had heard that I was in
+the WRONG place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
+The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark
+house of infancy.  I knew now why grass had always seemed to me
+as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick
+at home.
+
+
+
+VI THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+
+     The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an
+unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one.  The commonest
+kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.
+Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.
+It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is;
+its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
+its wildness lies in wait.  I give one coarse instance of what I mean.
+Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon
+up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing
+about it was that it was duplicate.  A man is two men, he on the
+right exactly resembling him on the left.  Having noted that there
+was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right
+and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side
+the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes,
+twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain.
+At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart
+on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other.
+And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
+
+     It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is
+the uncanny element in everything.  It seems a sort of secret
+treason in the universe.  An apple or an orange is round enough
+to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all.
+The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some
+simple astronomer into calling it a globe.  A blade of grass is
+called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point;
+but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the
+quiet and incalculable.  It escapes the rationalists, but it never
+escapes till the last moment.  From the grand curve of our earth it
+could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
+It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides,
+he should have a heart on both sides.  Yet scientific men are still
+organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are
+so fond of flat country.  Scientific men are also still organizing
+expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try to find it,
+they generally get on the wrong side of him.
+
+     Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it
+guesses these hidden malformations or surprises.  If our mathematician
+from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce
+the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain.  But if he
+guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should
+call him something more than a mathematician.  Now, this is exactly
+the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity.
+Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly
+becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.
+It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one
+may say so) exactly where the things go wrong.  Its plan suits
+the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected.  It is simple
+about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.
+It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all
+the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts.
+It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show
+that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology,
+we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.
+
+     I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that
+such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age.  Of course,
+anything can be believed in any age.  But, oddly enough, there really
+is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be
+believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.
+If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer
+reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia.  For the more
+complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.
+If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian,
+it might be an accident.  But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape
+of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.
+It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel
+of the philosophy of Christianity.  The complication of our modern
+world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of
+the plain problems of the ages of faith.  It was in Notting Hill
+and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true.
+This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details
+which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without
+believing in it.  When once one believes in a creed, one is proud
+of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity
+of science.  It shows how rich it is in discoveries.  If it is right
+at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
+A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.
+But a key and a lock are both complex.  And if a key fits a lock,
+you know it is the right key.
+
+     But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult
+to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.
+It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is
+entirely convinced.  It is comparatively easy when he is only
+partially convinced.  He is partially convinced because he has
+found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.
+But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he
+finds that something proves it.  He is only really convinced when he
+finds that everything proves it.  And the more converging reasons he
+finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked
+suddenly to sum them up.  Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man,
+on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?"
+he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be
+able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the
+coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen."
+The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.
+It has done so many things.  But that very multiplicity of proof
+which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
+
+     There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind
+of huge helplessness.  The belief is so big that it takes a long
+time to get it into action.  And this hesitation chiefly arises,
+oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin.
+All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never
+get there.  In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction
+I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing
+as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab.
+But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear,
+it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments
+of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of
+these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications.  All I had
+hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it.
+I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the
+age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age
+of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question.
+I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity
+and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.
+But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that,
+even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.
+I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it,
+at least, that I could find written in English and lying about;
+and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other
+note of philosophy.  The penny dreadfuls which I also read
+were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity;
+but I did not know this at the time.  I never read a line of
+Christian apologetics.  I read as little as I can of them now.
+It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me
+back to orthodox theology.  They sowed in my mind my first wild
+doubts of doubt.  Our grandmothers were quite right when they said
+that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind.  They do.
+They unsettled mine horribly.  The rationalist made me question
+whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished
+Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time)
+whether evolution had occurred at all.  As I laid down the last of
+Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke
+across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."  I was
+in a desperate way.
+
+     This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts
+deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways.
+I take only one.  As I read and re-read all the non-Christian
+or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh,
+a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically
+upon my mind--the impression that Christianity must be a most
+extraordinary thing.  For not only (as I understood) had Christianity
+the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent
+for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other.
+It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.
+No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far
+to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it
+was much too far to the west.  No sooner had my indignation died
+down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up
+again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
+In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give
+such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction
+in the sceptical attack.  I give four or five of them; there are
+fifty more.
+
+     Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack
+on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought
+(and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
+Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable
+than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
+But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely
+pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow
+up St. Paul's Cathedral.  But the extraordinary thing is this.
+They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction)
+that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II.,
+they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic.
+One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men,
+by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom
+of Nature.  But another accusation was that it comforted men with a
+fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery.
+One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough,
+and why it was hard to be free.  Another great agnostic objected
+that Christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by
+pious hands," hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that
+it was impossible to be free.  One rationalist had hardly done
+calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it
+a fool's paradise.  This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent.
+Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world,
+and also the white mask on a black world.  The state of the Christian
+could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling
+to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.
+If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another;
+it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.
+I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men
+of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of
+the creed--
+
+     "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown
+gray with Thy breath."
+
+But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as
+in "Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible,
+more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.
+The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself
+was pitch dark.  And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.
+The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself
+a pessimist.  I thought there must be something wrong.  And it did
+for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
+the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who,
+by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
+
+     It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the
+accusations were false or the accusers fools.  I simply deduced
+that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder
+than they made out.  A thing might have these two opposite vices;
+but it must be a rather queer thing if it did.  A man might be too fat
+in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.
+At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
+religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
+
+     Here is another case of the same kind.  I felt that a strong
+case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something
+timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian,"
+especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.
+The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.
+Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
+were decidedly men.  In comparison, it did seem tenable that there
+was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.
+The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests
+never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
+that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.
+I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different,
+I should have gone on believing it.  But I read something very different.
+I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
+up-side down.  Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for
+fighting too little, but for fighting too much.  Christianity, it seemed,
+was the mother of wars.  Christianity had deluged the world with blood.
+I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never
+was angry.  And now I was told to be angry with him because his
+anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history;
+because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.
+The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and
+non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached
+it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades.  It was the
+fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward
+the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.
+The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
+and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic
+Christian crimes.  What could it all mean?  What was this Christianity
+which always forbade war and always produced wars?  What could
+be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it
+would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?
+In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
+monstrous meekness?  The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape
+every instant.
+
+     I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves
+the one real objection to the faith.  The one real objection to the
+Christian religion is simply that it is one religion.  The world is
+a big place, full of very different kinds of people.  Christianity (it
+may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people;
+it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe.
+I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much
+drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--
+I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of
+all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience.
+Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them.
+The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages
+and still find essential ethical common sense.  It might find
+Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou
+shalt not steal."  It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on
+the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would
+be "Little boys should tell the truth."  I believed this doctrine
+of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense,
+and I believe it still--with other things.  And I was thoroughly
+annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed)
+that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light
+of justice and reason.  But then I found an astonishing thing.
+I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church
+from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality
+had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong
+in another.  If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
+needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed
+in their universal customs and ideals.  But if I mildly pointed
+out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
+then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men
+had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.
+I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was
+the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.
+But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves
+that science and progress were the discovery of one people,
+and that all other peoples had died in the dark.  Their chief insult
+to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves,
+and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative
+insistence on the two things.  When considering some pagan or agnostic,
+we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering
+some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd
+religions some men had.  We could trust the ethics of Epictetus,
+because ethics had never changed.  We must not trust the ethics
+of Bossuet, because ethics had changed.  They changed in two
+hundred years, but not in two thousand.
+
+     This began to be alarming.  It looked not so much as if
+Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather
+as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.
+What again could this astonishing thing be like which people
+were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind
+contradicting themselves?  I saw the same thing on every side.
+I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail;
+but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three
+accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others.
+Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity
+had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the
+loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes
+and their children.  But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced)
+said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family
+and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their
+homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation.
+The charge was actually reversed.  Or, again, certain phrases in the
+Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians
+to show contempt for woman's intellect.  But I found that the
+anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's intellect;
+for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that
+"only women" went to it.  Or again, Christianity was reproached
+with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas.
+But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp
+and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold.
+It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.
+Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality
+too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained
+it too little.  It is often accused in the same breath of prim
+respectability and of religious extravagance.  Between the covers
+of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked
+for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one another,"
+and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion
+that prevents the world from going to the dogs."  In the same
+conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity
+for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.
+
+     I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now;
+and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong.
+I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very
+wrong indeed.  Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing,
+but that thing must be very strange and solitary.  There are men
+who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare.  There are
+men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare.  But if this mass
+of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty,
+too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously
+to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge,
+a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed,
+then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.
+For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such
+exceptional corruption.  Christianity (theoretically speaking)
+was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.
+THEY gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
+Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural.
+It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.
+An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite
+as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
+The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that
+Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell.  Really, if Jesus
+of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
+
+     And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still
+thunderbolt.  There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.
+Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men.  Suppose we
+were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some
+too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness;
+some thought him too dark, and some too fair.  One explanation (as
+has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape.
+But there is another explanation.  He might be the right shape.
+Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short.  Very short men
+might feel him to be tall.  Old bucks who are growing stout might
+consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing
+thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance.
+Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man,
+while negroes considered him distinctly blonde.  Perhaps (in short)
+this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least
+the normal thing, the centre.  Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity
+that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways.
+I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any
+of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation.
+I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock.  For instance,
+it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity
+at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp.  But then
+it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined
+extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp.
+The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.
+But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before
+ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes.  The modern man
+found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex;
+he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.
+The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees.
+The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.
+And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it
+was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe.  If there was any
+insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread
+and wine.
+
+     I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far.
+The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians
+and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained.
+It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity,
+but a complication of diseases in Swinburne.  The restraints
+of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist
+than a healthy man should be.  The faith of Christians angered
+him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be.
+In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity;
+not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about
+Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human
+about Malthusianism.
+
+     Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity
+was merely sensible and stood in the middle.  There was really
+an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified
+the secularists in their superficial criticism.  It might be wise,
+I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not
+merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable.
+Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other;
+still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek,
+meek beyond all decency.  Now, it was just at this point of the
+speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and
+the suicide.  In that matter there had been this combination between
+two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity.
+This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already
+found to be true.  This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which
+sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right.
+Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide,
+they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long
+before I dreamed of Christianity.  Then the most difficult and
+interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace
+this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology.
+The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and
+the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both
+things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.
+Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics.  But I need not
+remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central
+in orthodox theology.  For orthodox theology has specially insisted
+that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf,
+nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both
+things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.
+Now let me trace this notion as I found it.
+
+     All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium;
+that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little.
+Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and
+evolution which seeks to destroy the MESON or balance of Aristotle.
+They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively,
+or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever.
+But the great truism of the MESON remains for all thinking men,
+and these people have not upset any balance except their own.
+But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest
+comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept.
+That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:  that was
+the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very
+strange way.
+
+     Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity
+declared it was in a conflict:  the collision of two passions
+apparently opposite.  Of course they were not really inconsistent;
+but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.
+Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide;
+and take the case of courage.  No quality has ever so much addled
+the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
+Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire
+to live taking the form of a readiness to die.  "He that will lose
+his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism
+for saints and heroes.  It is a piece of everyday advice for
+sailors or mountaineers.  It might be printed in an Alpine guide
+or a drill book.  This paradox is the whole principle of courage;
+even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage.  A man cut off by
+the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
+
+     He can only get away from death by continually stepping within
+an inch of it.  A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut
+his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a
+strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life,
+for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely
+wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.
+He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it;
+he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
+No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle
+with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so.
+But Christianity has done more:  it has marked the limits of it
+in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
+between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
+sake of dying.  And it has held up ever since above the European
+lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry:  the Christian courage,
+which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a
+disdain of life.
+
+     And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian
+key to ethics everywhere.  Everywhere the creed made a moderation
+out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions.  Take, for instance,
+the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and
+mere prostration.  The average pagan, like the average agnostic,
+would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently
+self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse,
+that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them.
+In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily
+with his nose in the air.  This is a manly and rational position,
+but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise
+between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of Matthew Arnold.
+Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
+neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.
+This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;
+you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this.  On the other hand,
+this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire
+and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and
+searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at
+the feet of the grass.  It does not make him look up and see marvels;
+for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland.  Thus it
+loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.
+Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both
+of them.
+
+     It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both.
+In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before;
+in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before.
+In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures.  In so far
+as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.  All humility that had
+meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view
+of his whole destiny--all that was to go.  We were to hear no more
+the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over
+the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest
+of all the beasts of the field.  Man was a statue of God walking
+about the garden.  Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes;
+man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.
+The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging
+to it.  Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it.
+Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only
+be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage.
+Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness
+of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission,
+in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.
+When one came to think of ONE'S SELF, there was vista and void enough
+for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth.  There the
+realistic gentleman could let himself go--as long as he let himself go
+at himself.  There was an open playground for the happy pessimist.
+Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original
+aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned
+fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools
+are not worth saving.  He must not say that a man, QUA man,
+can be valueless.  Here, again in short, Christianity got over the
+difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both,
+and keeping them both furious.  The Church was positive on both points.
+One can hardly think too little of one's self.  One can hardly think
+too much of one's soul.
+
+     Take another case:  the complicated question of charity,
+which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy.
+Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage.  Stated baldly,
+charity certainly means one of two things--pardoning unpardonable acts,
+or loving unlovable people.  But if we ask ourselves (as we did
+in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such
+a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it.
+A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive,
+and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at;
+a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed
+even after he was killed.  In so far as the act was pardonable,
+the man was pardonable.  That again is rational, and even refreshing;
+but it is a dilution.  It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice,
+such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent.  And it leaves
+no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole
+fascination of the charitable.  Christianity came in here as before.
+It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another.
+It divided the crime from the criminal.  The criminal we must forgive
+unto seventy times seven.  The crime we must not forgive at all.
+It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger
+and partly kindness.  We must be much more angry with theft than before,
+and yet much kinder to thieves than before.  There was room for wrath
+and love to run wild.  And the more I considered Christianity,
+the more I found that while it had established a rule and order,
+the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run
+wild.
+
+     Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look.
+Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions
+as do social and political liberty.  The ordinary aesthetic anarchist
+who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a
+paradox that prevents him feeling at all.  He breaks away from home
+limits to follow poetry.  But in ceasing to feel home limits he has
+ceased to feel the "Odyssey."  He is free from national prejudices
+and outside patriotism.  But being outside patriotism he is outside
+"Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature:
+he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.  For if there is a wall
+between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you
+describe yourself as locked in or as locked out.  What we want
+is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments;
+we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments.
+It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man
+is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of
+a city.  I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly
+detained there), but I am by no means free of that building.
+How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing
+them in a clear space without breakage or wrong?  THIS was the
+achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.
+Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic,
+the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism,
+as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.
+
+     St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting
+optimist than Walt Whitman.  St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil,
+could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer.  Both passions
+were free because both were kept in their place.  The optimist could
+pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march,
+the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle.
+But he must not call the fight needless.  The pessimist might draw
+as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds.
+But he must not call the fight hopeless.  So it was with all the
+other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion.
+By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly
+inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them
+to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible
+only to anarchists.  Meekness grew more dramatic than madness.
+Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange COUP DE THEATRE
+of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are
+to vice.  The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible
+and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that
+scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets,
+to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles,
+kissed the bloody head of the criminal.  Poetry could be acted as
+well as composed.  This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has
+entirely vanished with supernatural religion.  They, being humble,
+could parade themselves:  but we are too proud to be prominent.
+Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we
+are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist,
+go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it
+is cast into the quicklime.  Our ethical teachers write mildly
+against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see
+Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster
+Abbey.
+
+     Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing
+nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on
+the faith.  It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised
+celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so)
+been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.
+It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white,
+like the red and white upon the shield of St. George.  It has
+always had a healthy hatred of pink.  It hates that combination
+of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.
+It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to
+a dirty gray.  In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity
+might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour:
+not merely the absence of a colour.  All that I am urging here can
+be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these
+cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure.  It is not a mixture
+like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot
+silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.
+
+     So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges
+of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter.  It IS true
+that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight;
+and it IS true that those who fought were like thunderbolts
+and those who did not fight were like statues.  All this simply
+means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use
+its Tolstoyans.  There must be SOME good in the life of battle,
+for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.  There must be
+SOME good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem
+to enjoy being Quakers.  All that the Church did (so far as that goes)
+was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other.
+They existed side by side.  The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples
+of monks, simply became monks.  The Quakers became a club instead
+of becoming a sect.  Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
+out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity
+of revenge.  But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run
+the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed
+to run it.  The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James
+Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid.  And sometimes this pure
+gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture;
+the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul
+of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb.  But remember that
+this text is too lightly interpreted.  It is constantly assured,
+especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies
+down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal
+annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.  That is simply
+the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.
+The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still
+retain his royal ferocity?  THAT is the problem the Church attempted;
+THAT is the miracle she achieved.
+
+     This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities
+of life.  This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not
+in the middle.  This is knowing not only that the earth is round,
+but knowing exactly where it is flat.  Christian doctrine detected
+the oddities of life.  It not only discovered the law, but it
+foresaw the exceptions.  Those underrate Christianity who say that
+it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy.  In fact every
+one did.  But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--
+THAT was to anticipate a strange need of human nature.  For no one
+wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.
+Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor
+quite happy.  But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable
+without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery
+in psychology.  Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel";
+and it would have been a limit.  But to say, "Here you can swagger
+and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.
+
+     This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery
+of the new balance.  Paganism had been like a pillar of marble,
+upright because proportioned with symmetry.  Christianity was like
+a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
+pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences
+exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
+In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were
+all necessary.  Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
+every buttress was a flying buttress.  So in Christendom apparent
+accidents balanced.  Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold
+and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination;
+for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in
+the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold.  It is at least
+better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black
+and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.
+But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's;
+the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.
+Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could
+be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
+drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the
+orchards of England.  This is what makes Christendom at once so much
+more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire;
+just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than
+the Parthenon.  If any one wants a modern proof of all this,
+let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
+Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations.
+Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing
+of one emphasis against another emphasis.  The instinct of the
+Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens,
+and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent;
+the Frenchmen less experimental and swift."  But the instinct
+of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent,
+that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
+We will make an equipoise out of these excesses.  The absurdity
+called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."
+
+     Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains
+what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history
+of Christianity.  I mean the monstrous wars about small points
+of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.
+It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you
+are balancing.  The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth
+on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment
+of the irregular equilibrium.  Once let one idea become less powerful
+and some other idea would become too powerful.  It was no flock of sheep
+the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
+of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
+enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.
+Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas;
+she was a lion tamer.  The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit,
+of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,
+or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see,
+need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
+The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean,
+and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten
+forests of the north.  Of these theological equalisations I have
+to speak afterwards.  Here it is enough to notice that if some
+small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made
+in human happiness.  A sentence phrased wrong about the nature
+of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe.
+A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither
+all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs.  Doctrines had
+to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might
+enjoy general human liberties.  The Church had to be careful,
+if only that the world might be careless.
+
+     This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.  People have fallen
+into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
+humdrum, and safe.  There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
+as orthodoxy.  It was sanity:  and to be sane is more dramatic than to
+be mad.  It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
+seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
+having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
+The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
+yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
+one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.  She swerved to left and right,
+so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.  She left on one hand
+the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
+to make Christianity too worldly.  The next instant she was swerving
+to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
+The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
+the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.  It would
+have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
+It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
+to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.  It is easy to be
+a madman:  it is easy to be a heretic.  It is always easy to let
+the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
+It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
+To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
+which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
+historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
+It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
+which one falls, only one at which one stands.  To have fallen into
+any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
+have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided them all has been
+one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
+thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
+the wild truth reeling but erect.
+
+
+
+VII THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION
+
+
+     The following propositions have been urged:  First, that some
+faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some
+dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order
+to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content
+and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious
+equilibrium of the Stoic.  For mere resignation has neither the
+gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain.
+There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it.
+The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.
+Greek heroes do not grin:  but gargoyles do--because they are Christian.
+And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense)
+frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful.  Christ prophesied
+the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and
+respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs)
+objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem.
+He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out."
+Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the
+facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces
+and open mouths.  The prophecy has fulfilled itself:  the very stones
+cry out.
+
+     If these things be conceded, though only for argument,
+we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the
+natural man, called by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity),
+"The Old Man."  We can ask the next question so obviously in front
+of us.  Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better.
+But what do we mean by making things better?  Most modern talk on
+this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that circle which we
+have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism.
+Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it
+helps evolution.  The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise
+on the elephant.
+
+     Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle
+in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human
+or divine theory), there is no principle in nature.  For instance,
+the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that
+there is no equality in nature.  He is right, but he does not see
+the logical addendum.  There is no equality in nature; also there
+is no inequality in nature.  Inequality, as much as equality,
+implies a standard of value.  To read aristocracy into the anarchy
+of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.
+Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals:  the one saying
+that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.
+But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
+nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say
+that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.  We think the cat
+superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy
+to the effect that life is better than death.  But if the mouse
+were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat
+had beaten him at all.  He might think he had beaten the cat by
+getting to the grave first.  Or he might feel that he had actually
+inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.
+Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence,
+so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing
+in the cat the torture of conscious existence.  It all depends
+on the philosophy of the mouse.  You cannot even say that there
+is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
+about what things are superior.  You cannot even say that the cat
+scores unless there is a system of scoring.  You cannot even say
+that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to
+be got.
+
+     We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature,
+and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will
+leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
+We must have our own vision.  But the attempts of most moderns
+to express it are highly vague.
+
+     Some fall back simply on the clock:  they talk as if mere
+passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man
+of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human
+morality is never up to date.  How can anything be up to date?--
+a date has no character.  How can one say that Christmas
+celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month?
+What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind
+his favourite minority--or in front of it.  Other vague modern
+people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief
+mark of vague modern people.  Not daring to define their doctrine
+of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint
+or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap
+analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality.
+Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high."
+It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase
+from a steeple or a weathercock.  "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
+philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas.  "Tommy lived
+the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.
+
+     This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,
+whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.
+No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;
+but he was quite the reverse of strong.  He was not at all bold.
+He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
+as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,
+fearless men of thought.  Nietzsche always escaped a question
+by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet.  He said,
+"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,
+"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
+Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it
+was nonsense.  So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,
+"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all
+these are ideas; and ideas are alarming.  He says "the upper man,"
+or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
+Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker.  He does not really know
+in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.
+And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists,
+who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.
+
+     Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission
+and sitting still.  Nature is going to do something some day;
+nobody knows what, and nobody knows when.  We have no reason for acting,
+and no reason for not acting.  If anything happens it is right:
+if anything is prevented it was wrong.  Again, some people try
+to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.
+Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.
+Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.
+
+     Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever
+it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate
+aim of evolution.  And these are the only sensible people.
+This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution,
+to work for what you want, and to call THAT evolution.  The only
+intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men,
+is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make
+the whole world like that vision.  If you like to put it so,
+the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the
+mere method and preparation for something that we have to create.
+This is not a world, but rather the material for a world.
+God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours
+of a palette.  But he has also given us a subject, a model,
+a fixed vision.  We must be clear about what we want to paint.
+This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles.
+We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.
+We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary)
+in order to have something to change it to.
+
+     We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:
+personally I prefer to call it reform.  For reform implies form.
+It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image;
+to make it something that we see already in our minds.  Evolution is
+a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling.  Progress is a metaphor from
+merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road.  But reform
+is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men:  it means that we
+see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape.
+And we know what shape.
+
+     Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age.
+We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things.
+Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit
+the vision.  Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing
+the vision.  It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing
+justice and mercy among men:  it does mean that we are very swift
+in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy:  a wild page
+from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it.  Progress should mean
+that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem.  It does mean
+that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us.  We are not
+altering the real to suit the ideal.  We are altering the ideal:
+it is easier.
+
+     Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted
+a particular kind of world; say, a blue world.  He would have no
+cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task;
+he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could
+work away (in every sense) until all was blue.  He could have
+heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger.
+He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon.  But if he
+worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own
+point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it.
+If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day,
+he would get on slowly.  But if he altered his favourite colour
+every day, he would not get on at all.  If, after reading a
+fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow,
+his work would be thrown away:  there would be nothing to show except
+a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner.
+This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker.
+It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example.
+But it is literally the fact of recent history.  The great and grave
+changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early
+nineteenth century, not to the later.  They belonged to the black
+and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism,
+in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution.
+And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily,
+without scepticism:  and there was a time when the Established
+Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell.
+It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent;
+it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative.
+But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition
+in Radicalism to pull anything down.  There is a great deal of truth
+in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era
+of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose.
+But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what
+is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation
+because it is an age of complete unbelief.  Let beliefs fade fast
+and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same.
+The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery
+of matter will be left to itself.  The net result of all our
+political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism,
+Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of all
+of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain.
+The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church
+of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished.
+It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw
+and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs,
+bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
+
+     We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the
+safeguards against freedom.  Managed in a modern style the emancipation
+of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation
+of the slave.  Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free,
+and he will not free himself.  Again, it may be said that this
+instance is remote or extreme.  But, again, it is exactly true of
+the men in the streets around us.  It is true that the negro slave,
+being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection
+of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty.  But the man we see
+every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk
+in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe
+in freedom.  He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.
+He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of
+wild philosophies.  He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the
+next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.
+The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory.
+The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind.
+It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied
+with sceptical literature.  And now I come to think of it, of course,
+Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries.  He shows his sense.
+All modern books are on his side.  As long as the vision of heaven
+is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same.
+No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.
+The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will
+always change his mind.
+
+     This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards
+which progress is directed; it must be fixed.  Whistler used to make
+many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up
+twenty portraits.  But it would matter if he looked up twenty times,
+and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait.
+So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails
+to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful.
+But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal;
+for then all its old failures are fruitless.  The question therefore
+becomes this:  How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures
+while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art?
+How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always
+satisfied with working?  How can we make sure that the portrait
+painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking
+the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out
+of window?
+
+     A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary
+for rebelling.  This fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any
+sort of revolution.  Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas;
+but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas.  If I am merely
+to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic;
+but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable.  This is
+the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution.
+They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality,
+with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant.
+There is only one great disadvantage in this theory.  It talks of a slow
+movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement.
+A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things
+to be intrinsically intolerable.  To make the matter clear, it is better
+to take a specific example.  Certain of the idealistic vegetarians,
+such as Mr. Salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat;
+by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat,
+and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day
+it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs.  I do not discuss here the
+question of what is justice to animals.  I only say that whatever
+is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice.
+If an animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush to his rescue.
+But how can we rush if we are, perhaps, in advance of our time?  How can
+we rush to catch a train which may not arrive for a few centuries?
+How can I denounce a man for skinning cats, if he is only now what I
+may possibly become in drinking a glass of milk?  A splendid and insane
+Russian sect ran about taking all the cattle out of all the carts.
+How can I pluck up courage to take the horse out of my hansom-cab,
+when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little
+fast or the cabman's a little slow?  Suppose I say to a sweater,
+"Slavery suited one stage of evolution."  And suppose he answers,
+"And sweating suits this stage of evolution."  How can I answer if there
+is no eternal test?  If sweaters can be behind the current morality,
+why should not philanthropists be in front of it?  What on earth
+is the current morality, except in its literal sense--the morality
+that is always running away?
+
+     Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the
+innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish
+the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish
+the king to be promptly executed.  The guillotine has many sins,
+but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it.
+The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in
+the axe.  The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?"
+the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE:  exactly between your
+head and body."  There must at any given moment be an abstract
+right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something
+eternal if there is to be anything sudden.  Therefore for all
+intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping
+things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China,
+or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution,
+it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision.
+This is our first requirement.
+
+     When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence
+of something else in the discussion:  as a man hears a church bell
+above the sound of the street.  Something seemed to be saying,
+"My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations
+of the world.  My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered;
+for it is called Eden.  You may alter the place to which you
+are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come.
+To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution;
+for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan.
+In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven.  But in this
+world heaven is rebelling against hell.  For the orthodox there
+can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.
+At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which
+no man has seen since Adam.  No unchanging custom, no changing
+evolution can make the original good any thing but good.
+Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns:
+still they are not a part of him if they are sinful.  Men may
+have been under oppression ever since fish were under water;
+still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful.  The chain may
+seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does
+the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not,
+if they are sinful.  I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all
+your history.  Your vision is not merely a fixture:  it is a fact."
+I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity:  but I
+passed on.
+
+     I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress.
+Some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic
+and impersonal progress in the nature of things.  But it is clear
+that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress
+is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active,
+but rather a reason for being lazy.  If we are bound to improve,
+we need not trouble to improve.  The pure doctrine of progress
+is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.  But it
+is to none of these obvious comments that I wish primarily to
+call attention.
+
+     The only arresting point is this:  that if we suppose
+improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple.  The world
+might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly
+towards any particular arrangement of many qualities.  To take
+our original simile:  Nature by herself may be growing more blue;
+that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal.  But Nature
+cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours,
+unless Nature is personal.  If the end of the world were mere
+darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably
+as dusk or dawn.  But if the end of the world is to be a piece
+of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design
+in it, either human or divine.  The world, through mere time,
+might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat;
+but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art--
+then there is an artist.
+
+     If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance.  We
+constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians;
+
+I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one
+who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.
+They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and
+more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or
+sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not,
+have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice.  They say
+that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not
+here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical.
+As a fact, anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a
+primitive one.  It is much more likely that modern men will eat
+human flesh out of affectation than that primitive man ever ate
+it out of ignorance.  I am here only following the outlines of
+their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been
+progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves,
+then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.  I think it wrong
+to sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.
+Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.
+That is the drive of the argument.  And for this argument it can
+be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or
+inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer
+things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency,
+like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.
+This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.
+
+     Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities,
+but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one.  The kinship
+and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for
+being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy
+love of animals.  On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane,
+or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human.  That you
+and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger.
+Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger.  It is one way
+to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate
+the tiger.  But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat
+a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding
+his claws.
+
+     If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to
+the garden of Eden.  For the obstinate reminder continued to recur:
+only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature.  The essence
+of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really
+in this proposition:  that Nature is our mother.  Unfortunately, if you
+regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The
+main point of Christianity was this:  that Nature is not our mother:
+Nature is our sister.  We can be proud of her beauty, since we have
+the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire,
+but not to imitate.  This gives to the typically Christian pleasure
+in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.
+Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele.
+Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson.
+But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert.
+To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister:
+a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.
+
+     This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted
+it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally,
+the key would fit the smallest doors.  Our main point is here,
+that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature,
+it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph.
+One can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work
+for giving us longer and longer noses.  But the question is,
+do we want to have longer and longer noses?  I fancy not;
+I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far,
+and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed:"
+we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face.
+But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing
+interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular
+arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation
+to each other.  Proportion cannot be a drift:  it is either
+an accident or a design.  So with the ideal of human morality
+and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians.
+It is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands
+off things:  not to drive horses; not to pick flowers.  We may
+eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument;
+not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing.  The ultimate
+apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still,
+nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear
+of incommoding a microbe.  To so crude a consummation as that we
+might perhaps unconsciously drift.  But do we want so crude
+a consummation?  Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along
+the opposite or Nietzschian line of development--superman crushing
+superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed
+up for fun.  But do we want the universe smashed up for fun?
+Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular
+management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount
+of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery?
+If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall
+have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this:
+that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear.
+If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he
+is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The
+whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder,
+and haughty enough to defy.  So our attitude to the giant of the world
+must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt:
+it must be one particular proportion of the two--which is exactly right.
+We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us
+to make us tread fearfully on the grass.  We must also have enough
+disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion,
+spit at the stars.  Yet these two things (if we are to be good
+or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one
+particular combination.  The perfect happiness of men on the earth
+(if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the
+satisfaction of animals.  It will be an exact and perilous balance;
+like that of a desperate romance.  Man must have just enough faith
+in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to
+enjoy them.
+
+     This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress.
+First, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite.  It must not
+(if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing
+swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure;
+it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best
+proportion and relation.  I am not concerned at this moment to deny
+that some such good culmination may be, by the constitution of things,
+reserved for the human race.  I only point out that if this composite
+happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only
+a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness.
+If the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it
+must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning
+up of the world.  But if the beatification of the world is not
+a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist.
+And here again my contemplation was cloven by the ancient voice
+which said, "I could have told you all this a long time ago.
+If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress,
+the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations
+where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other.
+An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect
+flatness or a peak of perfect height.  But only a personal God can
+possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city
+with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each
+of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour
+to the many coloured coat of Joseph."
+
+     Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact
+answer that I required.  I had said, "The ideal must be fixed,"
+and the Church had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it
+existed before anything else."  I said secondly, "It must be
+artistically combined, like a picture"; and the Church answered,
+"Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it."
+Then I went on to the third thing, which, as it seemed to me,
+was needed for an Utopia or goal of progress.  And of all the three it
+is infinitely the hardest to express.  Perhaps it might be put thus:
+that we need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from Utopia
+as we fell from Eden.
+
+     We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive
+is that things naturally tend to grow better.  But the only real
+reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend
+to grow worse.  The corruption in things is not only the best
+argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument
+against being conservative.  The conservative theory would really
+be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact.
+But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave
+things alone you leave them as they are.  But you do not.
+If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
+If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.  If you
+particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again;
+that is, you must be always having a revolution.  Briefly, if you
+want the old white post you must have a new white post.  But this
+which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and
+terrible sense true of all human things.  An almost unnatural vigilance
+is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity
+with which human institutions grow old.  It is the custom in passing
+romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies.
+But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies;
+under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty
+years before.  Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic
+monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards)
+went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First.
+So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just
+after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored.
+The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.
+So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical
+manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people,
+until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant
+eating the people like bread.  So again, we have almost up to the
+last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion.
+Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start)
+that they are obviously nothing of the kind.  They are, by the nature
+of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men.  We have not any need
+to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.
+It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold
+up the modern world.  There is no fear that a modern king will
+attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he
+will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take
+no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will
+take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he
+is free from criticism and publicity.  For the king is the most
+private person of our time.  It will not be necessary for any one
+to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press.
+We do not need a censorship of the press.  We have a censorship by
+the press.
+
+     This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn
+oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory
+of progress to allow.  It must always be on the look out for every
+privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong.
+In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists.
+They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions;
+they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child
+of man.  The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people
+becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell
+the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.  Here, I say,
+I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary.
+And then I caught my breath again:  for I remembered that I was once
+again on the side of the orthodox.
+
+     Christianity spoke again and said:  "I have always maintained
+that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its
+own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings
+as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud
+and prosperous human beings.  This eternal revolution, this suspicion
+sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the
+doctrine of progress.  If you were a philosopher you would call it,
+as I do, the doctrine of original sin.  You may call it the cosmic
+advance as much as you like; I call it what it is--the Fall."
+
+     I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I
+confess it came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to
+think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real
+right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred.
+I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats,
+saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make
+them mentally and morally degraded.  I have listened to scientific
+men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy)
+saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong
+will disappear.  I have listened to them with a horrible attention,
+with a hideous fascination.  For it was like watching a man
+energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.
+If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike
+democracy dead.  If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may
+or may not be practical to raise them.  But it is certainly quite
+practical to disfranchise them.  If the man with a bad bedroom cannot
+give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he
+shall give no vote.  The governing class may not unreasonably say:
+"It may take us some time to reform his bedroom.  But if he is the
+brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country.
+Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance."
+It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the
+earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy,
+expatiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule.
+It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising
+for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had
+recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off
+his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed
+from prison uniform.  At any moment, one feels, the host might say
+that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all.
+So it is when the ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face,
+proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be
+really trustworthy.  At any moment the rich may say, "Very well,
+then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his face.
+On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment,
+the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming.  If clean homes
+and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the
+present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air?
+If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves,
+why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit
+to govern them?  On the ordinary environment argument the matter is
+fairly manifest.  The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard
+in Utopia.
+
+     Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have
+had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides?
+Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed
+clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul?
+As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer
+is Christianity.  Only the Christian Church can offer any rational
+objection to a complete confidence in the rich.  For she has maintained
+from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment,
+but in man.  Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a
+dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the
+commodious environment.  I know that the most modern manufacture has
+been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle.
+I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious
+to discover a very small camel.  But if we diminish the camel
+to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest--if,
+in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least
+that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this--
+that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.
+Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern
+society to rags.  The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly
+ultimatum to the world.  For the whole modern world is absolutely
+based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is
+tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian)
+is not tenable.  You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions
+about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics,
+this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed.  The fact is,
+of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already.
+That is why he is a rich man.  The whole case for Christianity is that
+a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man,
+spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt.
+There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints
+have said with a sort of savage monotony.  They have said simply
+that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
+It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators
+of definable justice.  It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown
+the rich as convenient rulers of society.  It is not certainly
+un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich.
+But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard
+the rich as more morally safe than the poor.  A Christian may
+consistently say, "I respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes."
+But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch
+and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes."
+For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may
+take bribes.  It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by
+a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history.
+When people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible,
+there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion.  Was Lord
+Bacon a bootblack?  Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper?
+In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man
+in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position
+at this moment.
+
+     Much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out
+to the effect that Christianity is akin to democracy, and most
+of it is scarcely strong or clear enough to refute the fact that
+the two things have often quarrelled.  The real ground upon which
+Christianity and democracy are one is very much deeper.  The one
+specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle--
+the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule.
+Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.  If our faith comments
+on government at all, its comment must be this--that the man should
+rule who does NOT think that he can rule.  Carlyle's hero may say,
+"I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say "Nolo episcopari."
+If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it means this--
+that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry
+places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man
+who feels himself unfit to wear it.  Carlyle was quite wrong;
+we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule.
+Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he
+can't.
+
+     Now, this is one of the two or three vital defences of
+working democracy.  The mere machinery of voting is not democracy,
+though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method.
+But even the machinery of voting is profoundly Christian in this
+practical sense--that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those
+who would be too modest to offer it.  It is a mystical adventure;
+it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves.
+That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom.  There is nothing
+really humble about the abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindoo
+is mild, but he is not meek.  But there is something psychologically
+Christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure
+rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion
+of the prominent.  To say that voting is particularly Christian may
+seem somewhat curious.  To say that canvassing is Christian may seem
+quite crazy.  But canvassing is very Christian in its primary idea.
+It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man,
+"Friend, go up higher."  Or if there is some slight defect
+in canvassing, that is in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only
+because it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser.
+
+     Aristocracy is not an institution:  aristocracy is a sin;
+generally a very venial one.  It is merely the drift or slide
+of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful,
+which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world.
+
+     It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion
+of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are
+also the most fragile or full of sensibility.  The swiftest things
+are the softest things.  A bird is active, because a bird is soft.
+A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard.  The stone must
+by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.
+The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force.
+In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can
+maintain itself in the air.  Modern investigators of miraculous
+history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great
+saints is their power of "levitation."  They might go further;
+a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity.
+Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
+This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially
+the instinct of Christian art.  Remember how Fra Angelico represented
+all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies.
+Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light
+and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet.  It was
+the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate
+in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover
+the deep levity of the Middle Ages.  In the old Christian pictures
+the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute.
+Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens.
+The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed
+plumes of the angels.  But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud
+in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards,
+for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.  Pride is the downward
+drag of all things into an easy solemnity.  One "settles down"
+into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay
+self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up
+at a blue sky.  Seriousness is not a virtue.  It would be a heresy,
+but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice.
+It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely,
+because it is the easiest thing to do.  It is much easier to
+write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH.
+For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap.
+It is easy to be heavy:  hard to be light.  Satan fell by the force of
+gravity.
+
+     Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe since it has been Christian
+that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart
+treated aristocracy as a weakness--generally as a weakness that must
+be allowed for.  If any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him
+go outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere.
+Let him, for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes
+of India.  There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far
+more intellectual.  It is seriously felt that the scale of classes
+is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the
+butcher in an invisible and sacred sense.  But no Christianity,
+not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet
+was better than a butcher in that sacred sense.  No Christianity,
+however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would
+not be damned.  In pagan society there may have been (I do not know)
+some such serious division between the free man and the slave.
+But in Christian society we have always thought the gentleman
+a sort of joke, though I admit that in some great crusades
+and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke.
+But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took
+aristocracy seriously.  It is only an occasional non-European
+alien (such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite)
+who can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously.
+It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it
+seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type,
+but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all
+the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects.  It is casual,
+it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one
+great merit that overlaps even these.  The great and very obvious
+merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take
+it seriously.
+
+     In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for
+an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity
+had been there before me.  The whole history of my Utopia has the
+same amusing sadness.  I was always rushing out of my architectural
+study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there
+in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old.  For me, in the
+ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer,
+"Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings."  Without vanity, I really
+think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage
+vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered,
+with a sigh, that it had been invented already.  But, since it would
+be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch,
+my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem,
+I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating
+the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.
+
+     When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about
+impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss
+an important distinction.  In modern ideal conceptions of society
+there are some desires that are possibly not attainable:  but there
+are some desires that are not desirable.  That all men should live
+in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained.
+But that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not
+a dream at all; it is a nightmare.  That a man should love all old
+women is an ideal that may not be attainable.  But that a man should
+regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only
+an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained.
+I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples;
+but I will add the example which has always affected me most.
+I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me
+the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself.
+Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have
+any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible
+to have any fun.  To take an obvious instance, it would not be
+worth while to bet if a bet were not binding.  The dissolution
+of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport.
+Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted
+shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance,
+of which much has been said in these pages.  And the perils, rewards,
+punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or
+the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare.  If I bet
+I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting.  If I challenge
+I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging.
+If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful,
+or there is no fun in vowing.  You could not even make a fairy tale
+from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale,
+might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he
+was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo.
+For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real;
+results must be irrevocable.  Christian marriage is the great
+example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it
+is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing.
+And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask,
+and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept
+to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously;
+I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.
+
+     All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully,
+for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties.
+But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond
+the world.  "You will have real obligations, and therefore real
+adventures when you get to my Utopia.  But the hardest obligation
+and the steepest adventure is to get there."
+
+
+
+VIII THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY
+
+
+     It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness
+of our epoch.  But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is
+a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real
+laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.  Take one quite
+external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars;
+but this is not due to human activity but to human repose.
+There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people
+were simply walking about.  Our world would be more silent if it
+were more strenuous.  And this which is true of the apparent physical
+bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.
+Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery;
+and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
+Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods
+to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
+Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains.  We know they
+are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk
+and think for themselves.  It is a good exercise to try for once
+in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.
+If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is
+recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological
+evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,"
+you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement
+of the gray matter inside your skull.  But if you begin "I wish
+Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,"
+you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged
+to think.  The long words are not the hard words, it is the short
+words that are hard.  There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the
+word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
+
+     But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil
+of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially
+ruinous and confusing.  This difficulty occurs when the same long word
+is used in different connections to mean quite different things.
+Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has
+one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece
+of moral rhetoric.  In the same way the scientific materialists
+have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist"
+as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt.
+So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives"
+in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.
+
+     A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection
+with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied
+to politics and society.  It is often suggested that all Liberals
+ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that
+is free.  You might just as well say that all idealists ought to be
+High Churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high.
+You might as well say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass,
+or that Broad Churchmen ought to like broad jokes.  The thing is
+a mere accident of words.  In actual modern Europe a freethinker
+does not mean a man who thinks for himself.  It means a man who,
+having thought for himself, has come to one particular class
+of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility
+of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on.
+And none of these ideas are particularly liberal.  Nay, indeed almost
+all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose
+of this chapter to show.
+
+     In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly
+as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly
+insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social
+practice would be definitely illiberal.  Almost every contemporary
+proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal
+to bring tyranny into the world.  For freeing the church now
+does not even mean freeing it in all directions.  It means
+freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific,
+dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity.
+And every one of these (and we will take them one by one)
+can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.  In fact, it is
+a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one
+comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression.
+There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point
+in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy.  I may,
+it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant.
+But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
+
+     Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes
+of the new theology or the modernist church.  We concluded the last
+chapter with the discovery of one of them.  The very doctrine which
+is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard
+of the new democracies of the earth.  The doctrine seemingly
+most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people.
+In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy
+was in the affirmation of original sin.  So it is, I maintain,
+in all the other cases.
+
+     I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles.
+For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it
+is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe
+in them.  Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me.
+For some inconceivable cause a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always
+means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles;
+it never means a man who wishes to increase that number.  It always
+means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave;
+it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came
+out of her grave.  It is common to find trouble in a parish because
+the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water;
+yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman
+says that his father walked on the Serpentine?  And this is not
+because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort)
+miracles cannot be believed in our experience.  It is not because
+"miracles do not happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited
+with simple faith.  More supernatural things are ALLEGED to have
+happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago.
+Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did:
+the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit
+are always being unveiled in modern psychology.  Things that the old
+science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly
+being asserted by the new science.  The only thing which is still
+old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology.
+But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has
+nothing to do with the evidence for or against them.  It is a lifeless
+verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not
+in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.
+The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the
+Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it.
+He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow
+him to believe it.  Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man,
+uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he
+said that there was faith in their honest doubt.  There was indeed.
+Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.  In their
+doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate;
+a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.
+The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.
+
+     Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will
+speak afterwards.  Here we are only concerned with this clear point;
+that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be
+on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously
+on the side of miracles.  Reform or (in the only tolerable sense)
+progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind.
+A miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind.  If you
+wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously
+in the wilderness is impossible--but you cannot think it illiberal.
+If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot
+think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons;
+you can only think it unlikely.  A holiday, like Liberalism, only means
+the liberty of man.  A miracle only means the liberty of God.
+You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call
+your denial a triumph of the liberal idea.  The Catholic Church
+believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom.
+Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God.
+Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up
+God as the Apocalypse chained the devil.  It leaves nothing free
+in the universe.  And those who assist this process are called the
+"liberal theologians."
+
+     This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case.
+The assumption that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin
+to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth.
+If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter;
+he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable
+and logical, which are much better things.  But if he can believe
+in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so;
+because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly,
+its control over the tyranny of circumstance.  Sometimes this truth
+is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men.
+For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned
+contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach
+of faith on the part of nature:  he seems strangely unconscious
+that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree,
+the doctrine of the omnipotence of will.  Just in the same way he calls
+the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he
+has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness.
+How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet
+mean to wish to make it immortal?  No, if it is desirable that man
+should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom, then miracles
+are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards whether they
+are possible.
+
+     But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error;
+the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps
+the liberation of the world.  The second example of it can be found
+in the question of pantheism--or rather of a certain modern attitude
+which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism.
+But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it
+with rather more preparation.
+
+     The things said most confidently by advanced persons to
+crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact;
+it is actually our truisms that are untrue.  Here is a case.
+There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again
+at ethical societies and parliaments of religion:  "the religions
+of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in
+what they teach."  It is false; it is the opposite of the fact.
+The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms;
+they do greatly differ in what they teach.  It is as if a man
+were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the CHURCH TIMES
+and the FREETHINKER look utterly different, that one is painted
+on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular
+and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say
+the same thing."  The truth is, of course, that they are alike in
+everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing.
+An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian
+stockbroker in Wimbledon.  You may walk round and round them
+and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without
+seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly
+godless in the umbrella.  It is exactly in their souls that they
+are divided.  So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds
+of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim:  that they agree
+in meaning, but differ in machinery.  It is exactly the opposite.
+They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works
+with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars,
+sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.  They agree in the mode
+of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught.
+Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples,
+just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers.  Creeds that
+exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies
+that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
+
+     The great example of this alleged identity of all human religions
+is the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity.
+Those who adopt this theory generally avoid the ethics of most
+other creeds, except, indeed, Confucianism, which they like
+because it is not a creed.  But they are cautious in their praises
+of Mahommedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing
+its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes.
+They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view of marriage (for which
+there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish
+worshippers their attitude may even be called cold.  But in the
+case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.
+
+     Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always
+insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike,
+especially Buddhism.  This is generally believed, and I believed
+it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.
+The reasons were of two kinds:  resemblances that meant nothing
+because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which
+were not resemblances at all.  The author solemnly explained that
+the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike,
+or else he described them as alike in some point in which they
+are quite obviously different.  Thus, as a case of the first class,
+he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice
+coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice
+to come out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely urged
+that these two Eastern teachers, by a singular coincidence, both had
+to do with the washing of feet.  You might as well say that it was
+a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.  And the
+other class of similarities were those which simply were not similar.
+Thus this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention
+to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama
+is rent in pieces out of respect, and the remnants highly valued.
+But this is the reverse of a resemblance, for the garments of Christ
+were not rent in pieces out of respect, but out of derision;
+and the remnants were not highly valued except for what they would
+fetch in the rag shops.  It is rather like alluding to the obvious
+connection between the two ceremonies of the sword:  when it taps
+a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head.  It is not at all
+similar for the man.  These scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed
+matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical
+resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much
+or not proving anything.  That Buddhism approves of mercy or of
+self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like Christianity;
+it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence.
+Buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all
+sane human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess.
+But to say that Buddhism and Christianity give the same philosophy
+of these things is simply false.  All humanity does agree that we are
+in a net of sin.  Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out.
+But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two
+institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly
+as Buddhism and Christianity.
+
+     Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though
+unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike,
+there was one thing about them that always perplexed me;
+I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art.
+I do not mean in its technical style of representation,
+but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent.
+No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint
+in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple.
+The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest
+statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut,
+while the Christian saint always has them very wide open.
+The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes
+are heavy and sealed with sleep.  The mediaeval saint's body is
+wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive.
+There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that
+produced symbols so different as that.  Granted that both images
+are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be
+a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances.
+The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards.
+The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.  If we
+follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.
+
+     A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay,
+announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all
+faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was
+quite prepared to say what it was.  According to Mrs. Besant this
+universal Church is simply the universal self.  It is the doctrine
+that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of
+individuality between man and man.  If I may put it so, she does not
+tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours.
+That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of
+the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement.
+And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more
+violently disagree.  I want to love my neighbour not because he is I,
+but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world,
+not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self,
+but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different.
+If souls are separate love is possible.  If souls are united love
+is obviously impossible.  A man may be said loosely to love himself,
+but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must
+be a monotonous courtship.  If the world is full of real selves,
+they can be really unselfish selves.  But upon Mrs. Besant's principle
+the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.
+
+     It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism
+and immanence.  And it is just here that Christianity is on the
+side of humanity and liberty and love.  Love desires personality;
+therefore love desires division.  It is the instinct of Christianity
+to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces,
+because they are living pieces.  It is her instinct to say "little
+children love one another" rather than to tell one large person
+to love himself.  This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism
+and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality
+is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God,
+the whole point of his cosmic idea.  The world-soul of the Theosophists
+asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it.
+But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it
+in order that he might love it.  The oriental deity is like a giant
+who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it;
+but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange
+generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its
+own accord shake hands with him.  We come back to the same tireless
+note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies
+are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which
+separates and sets free.  No other philosophy makes God actually
+rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.
+But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God
+and man is sacred, because this is eternal.  That a man may love God
+it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved,
+but a man to love him.  All those vague theosophical minds for whom
+the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which
+shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels,
+which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a
+sundering sword.  The saying rings entirely true even considered
+as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real
+love is bound to beget hate.  It is as true of democratic fraternity
+as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy;
+but real love has always ended in bloodshed.  Yet there is another
+and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance
+of our Lord.  According to Himself the Son was a sword separating
+brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other.
+But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning
+separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other
+at last.
+
+     This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the
+eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture.  This is the meaning
+of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image.  The Christian
+saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world;
+he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment.
+But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things?--
+since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can
+hardly be astonished at itself.  There have been many pantheist poems
+suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones.  The pantheist
+cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really
+distinct from himself.  Our immediate business here, however, is with
+the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards,
+towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general
+need for ethical activity and social reform.  And surely its
+effect is sufficiently obvious.  There is no real possibility
+of getting out of pantheism, any special impulse to moral action.
+For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good
+as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing
+is greatly preferable to another.  Swinburne in the high summer
+of his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty.
+In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the inspiration of Garibaldi
+and the revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the
+purer God which should wither up all the priests of the world:
+
+"What doest thou now      Looking Godward to cry      I am I,
+thou art thou,      I am low, thou art high,      I am thou that thou
+seekest to find him, find thou but thyself, thou art I."
+
+     Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants
+are as much the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba
+of Naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself"
+is identical with the ultimate good in all things.  The truth is
+that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly
+due to the western theology that says "I am I, thou art thou."
+The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in
+the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples.  The worshippers
+of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba.  The worshippers of Swinburne's god
+have covered Asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant.
+The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is
+looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and It.
+It is a rational occupation:  but it is not true in theory and not
+true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon.
+That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity
+(the command that we should WATCH and pray) has expressed itself
+both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics:
+but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different
+from ourselves, a deity that disappears.  Certainly the most sagacious
+creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper
+rings of the labyrinth of our own ego.  But only we of Christendom
+have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains:
+and we have killed all monsters in the chase.
+
+     Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value
+democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much
+more likely to find them in the old theology than the new.
+If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy:  especially in this
+matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R.J.Campbell),
+the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity.
+By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection,
+self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--Tibet.  By insisting
+specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity,
+moral and political adventure, righteous indignation--Christendom.
+Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself.
+By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
+
+     If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned
+we shall find the case the same.  It is the same, for instance,
+in the deep matter of the Trinity.  Unitarians (a sect never to be
+mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual
+dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the
+accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude.
+But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in
+the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity.  The complex
+God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect;
+but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty
+of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet.  The god
+who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.
+The HEART of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly
+much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather
+round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy
+pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty
+and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world.
+For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not
+well for man to be alone."  The social instinct asserted itself
+everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled
+by the Western idea of monks.  So even asceticism became brotherly;
+and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent.
+If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly
+healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian.
+For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence)--to us God
+Himself is a society.  It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology,
+and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would
+not be relevant to do so here.  Suffice it to say here that this triple
+enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside;
+that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart:
+but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns,
+come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who
+with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world.  For it is not well
+for God to be alone.
+
+     Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger
+of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds.  To hope
+for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their
+salvation is inevitable.  It is tenable, but it is not specially
+favourable to activity or progress.  Our fighting and creative society
+ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact
+that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.
+To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark:
+but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet.  Europe ought rather
+to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it.
+Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances.
+To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science
+or a plan, which must end up in a certain way.  But to a Christian
+existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way.  In a thrilling
+novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten
+by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill
+that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals.  The hero must (so to speak)
+be an eatable hero.  So Christian morals have always said to the man,
+not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he
+didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man
+"damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call
+him damnable.
+
+     All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads.
+The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug,
+all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments.
+The true philosophy is concerned with the instant.  Will a man
+take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about,
+if you enjoy thinking.  The aeons are easy enough to think about,
+any one can think about them.  The instant is really awful:
+and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant,
+that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology
+dealt much with hell.  It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book:
+it is at an immortal crisis.  There is a great deal of real similarity
+between popular fiction and the religion of the western people.
+If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say
+what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the
+Catholic churches.  Life (according to the faith) is very like a
+serial story in a magazine:  life ends with the promise (or menace)
+"to be continued in our next."  Also, with a noble vulgarity,
+life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment.
+For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
+
+     But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it
+so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will.
+You cannot finish a sum how you like.  But you can finish a story
+how you like.  When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus
+there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover.
+But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to
+Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined.  And Christendom has
+excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted
+on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much
+to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this
+is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating
+crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment
+like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
+The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
+choice whereas disease is not.  If you say that you are going to cure
+a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
+"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want
+to be profligates."  A man may lie still and be cured of a malady.
+But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin;
+on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.
+The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word
+which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood;
+"sinner" is in the active.  If a man is to be saved from influenza,
+he may be a patient.  But if he is to be saved from forging,
+he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT.  He must be personally
+impatient with forgery.  All moral reform must start in the active
+not the passive will.
+
+     Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion.  In so far
+as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions
+which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage
+the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it.
+If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right
+things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right.
+But if we particularly want to MAKE them go right, we must insist
+that they may go wrong.
+
+     Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common
+modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ.
+The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end.
+But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary.
+That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we
+knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast
+for all insurgents for ever.  Christianity is the only religion
+on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.
+Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God,
+must have been a rebel as well as a king.  Alone of all creeds,
+Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.
+For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean
+that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break.
+In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it
+is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my
+phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the
+greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
+But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional
+suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way)
+went not only through agony, but through doubt.  It is written,
+"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God."  No; but the Lord thy God may
+tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.
+In a garden Satan tempted man:  and in a garden God tempted God.
+He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror
+of pessimism.  When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven,
+it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross:
+the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.  And now let
+the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all
+the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable
+recurrence and of unalterable power.  They will not find another god
+who has himself been in revolt.  Nay, (the matter grows too difficult
+for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god.
+They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation;
+only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be
+an atheist.
+
+     These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy,
+of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of
+revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it
+is obviously only an abstract assertion.  Its main advantage
+is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies.
+Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology.  It can always
+be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air.
+But it is not so high in the air but that great archers spend their
+whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and their last arrows;
+there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization
+if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale.  This is the last
+and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will
+use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers,
+and the firebrands that burn their own homes.  Men who begin to fight
+the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging
+away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.
+This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it.
+Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove
+that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to
+maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants,
+from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity.
+I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no
+personal existence after death that he falls back on the position
+that he has no personal existence now.  He invokes Buddhism and says
+that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he
+cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool.
+I have known people who protested against religious education with
+arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must
+grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.  I have known
+people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing
+that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes.
+They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed
+their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with,
+though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.
+We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this
+world for love of the other.  But what are we to say of the fanatic
+who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other?  He sacrifices
+the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God.
+He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert
+the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.
+He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live,
+for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived
+at all.
+
+     And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt.  Its opponents
+only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear.
+They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political
+and common courage sense.  They do not prove that Adam was not
+responsible to God; how could they prove it?  They only prove
+(from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia.
+They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God;
+they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men.
+With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain
+that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make
+certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here.
+With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong
+they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make
+it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove.
+Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes
+are the fathers of all worldly confusion.  The secularists have not
+wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things,
+if that is any comfort to them.  The Titans did not scale heaven;
+but they laid waste the world.
+
+
+
+IX AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER
+
+
+     The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that
+orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of
+morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty,
+innovation and advance.  If we wish to pull down the prosperous
+oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility;
+we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.  If we want
+to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot
+do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can
+do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.
+If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and
+tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting
+on the Immanent God and the Inner Light:  for these are at best
+reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the
+transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means
+divine discontent.  If we wish particularly to assert the idea
+of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we
+shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian.  If we
+desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall
+insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is
+ultimately unreal.  And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified,
+we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified,
+rather than a mere sage or hero.  Above all, if we wish to protect
+the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas.
+The RULES of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member.
+The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.
+
+     And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes
+the whole matter.  A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree
+with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found
+a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well.
+You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely
+asserted in Original Sin; all right.  You have found a truth in
+the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you.  You are convinced that
+worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive;
+I congratulate them.  But even supposing that those doctrines
+do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave
+the doctrines?  Granted that all modern society is trusting
+the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness;
+granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because
+(believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot
+you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall?
+If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents
+a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea
+of danger and leave the idea of damnation?  If you see clearly
+the kernel of common-sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy,
+why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?
+Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I,
+as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using)
+why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can
+define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest,
+all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?"
+This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a
+pleasure to try to answer it.
+
+     The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist.
+I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
+If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual
+convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd
+psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise
+of freewill if I believe that he has got it.  But I am in this matter
+yet more definitely a rationalist.  I do not propose to turn this
+book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad
+to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more
+obvious arena.  Here I am only giving an account of my own growth
+in spiritual certainty.  But I may pause to remark that the more I
+saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology
+the less I thought of them.  I mean that having found the moral
+atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked
+at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation
+and found them to be common nonsense.  In case the argument should
+be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I
+will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions
+on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.
+
+     If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe
+in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an
+intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity."  I believe in it
+quite rationally upon the evidence.  But the evidence in my case,
+as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that
+alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small
+but unanimous facts.  The secularist is not to be blamed because
+his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy;
+it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind.
+I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy
+from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape,
+and one old friend.  The very fact that the things are of different
+kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point
+to one conclusion.  Now, the non-Christianity of the average
+educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up
+of these loose but living experiences.  I can only say that my
+evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind
+as his evidences against it.  For when I look at these various
+anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true.
+I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows
+the other way.  Let us take cases.  Many a sensible modern man
+must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such
+converging convictions as these:  first, that men, with their shape,
+structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts,
+a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion
+arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies
+with bitterness and gloom.  Those three anti-Christian arguments
+are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate;
+and they all converge.  The only objection to them (I discover)
+is that they are all untrue.  If you leave off looking at books
+about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then
+(if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic
+or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not
+how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is.  It is the
+monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.
+That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being
+so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock
+and the enigma.  That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the
+philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing
+with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve
+marble or carve mutton.  People talk of barbaric architecture and
+debased art.  But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory
+even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures,
+though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes.
+Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior
+to ours.  They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth
+only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization.  Who ever
+found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?
+Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens
+of old?  No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have
+a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.  We talk of wild animals;
+but man is the only wild animal.  It is man that has broken out.
+All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability
+of the tribe or type.  All other animals are domestic animals;
+man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.
+So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything,
+a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that
+all religion begins.
+
+     It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance
+rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine
+began in some darkness and terror.  When I did attempt to examine
+the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there
+were none.  Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man;
+for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors
+choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once
+innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is
+no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence
+is very much the other way.  In the earliest legends we have,
+such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice
+is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new;
+as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods.
+History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder
+in its earliest time.  There is no tradition of progress; but the whole
+human race has a tradition of the Fall.  Amusingly enough, indeed,
+the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity.
+Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot
+be true because every race of mankind remembers it.  I cannot keep
+pace with these paradoxes.
+
+     And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same;
+the view that priests darken and embitter the world.  I look at the
+world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe
+which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries
+where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art
+in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls;
+but they are the walls of a playground.  Christianity is the only
+frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.  We might fancy
+some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island
+in the sea.  So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge
+they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the
+place the noisiest of nurseries.  But the walls were knocked down,
+leaving the naked peril of the precipice.  They did not fall over;
+but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in
+terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.
+
+     Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make
+an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round.  I am left saying,
+"Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man
+among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some
+ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan
+joy in the countries of the Catholic Church."  One explanation,
+at any rate, covers all three:  the theory that twice was the natural
+order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people
+now call "psychic."  Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power
+or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of Nature;
+and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting)
+Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man.
+This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards;
+and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is
+the little continent where Christ has His Church.  I know it will
+be said that Japan has become progressive.  But how can this be an
+answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really
+only mean, "Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much
+to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark.
+I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being
+guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something;
+only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed
+to something else.
+
+     I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian
+arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur
+of the moment another.  These are the kind of thoughts which in
+combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak
+and diseased.  First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature,
+sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second,
+that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance,
+and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people
+still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people
+as the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.
+I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing:  that when I
+looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions
+were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
+Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I
+looked at the New Testament.  There I found an account, not in the
+least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands
+clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder
+and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils,
+passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a
+sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--
+and always like a god.  Christ had even a literary style of his own,
+not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious
+use of the A FORTIORI.  His "how much more" is piled one upon
+another like castle upon castle in the clouds.  The diction used
+ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive.
+But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque;
+it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled
+into the sea.  Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself
+a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their
+coats for them.  That he used other even wilder words on the side
+of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also,
+if anything, rather increases the violence.  We cannot even explain
+it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one
+consistent channel.  The maniac is generally a monomaniac.  Here we
+must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given;
+Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions
+may blaze beside each other.  The one explanation of the Gospel
+language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one
+who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.
+
+     I take in order the next instance offered:  the idea that
+Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages.  Here I did not satisfy myself
+with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history.
+And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the
+Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.
+It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.
+If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery
+the answer is simple:  it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean
+civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire.  The world
+was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun,
+when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.  It is perfectly true
+that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that
+the ship came up again:  repainted and glittering, with the cross
+still at the top.  This is the amazing thing the religion did:
+it turned a sunken ship into a submarine.  The ark lived under the load
+of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans,
+we arose and remembered Rome.  If our faith had been a mere fad
+of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight,
+and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have
+never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.
+But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and
+was also the first life of the new.  She took the people who were
+forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the
+Gothic arch.  In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said
+of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it.  How can
+we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?
+The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
+
+     I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance
+taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened
+or made stagnant by superstition.  I only added it because this
+is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be
+a statement of falsehood.  It is constantly said of the Irish that
+they are impractical.  But if we refrain for a moment from looking
+at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them,
+we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite
+painfully successful.  The poverty of their country, the minority
+of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked
+to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much
+with such conditions.  The Nationalists were the only minority
+that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply
+out of its path.  The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these
+islands who have forced their masters to disgorge.  These people,
+whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be
+squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character,
+the case was the same.  Irishmen are best at the specially
+HARD professions--the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.
+In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion:
+the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not
+looked at the facts.  The sceptic is too credulous; he believes
+in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.  Again the three questions
+left me with three very antagonistic questions.  The average sceptic
+wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel,
+the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political
+impracticability of the Celtic Christians.  But I wanted to ask,
+and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this
+incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth
+like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying
+civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead;
+this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry
+with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask,
+while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island
+of the Empire can actually help itself?"
+
+     There is an answer:  it is an answer to say that the energy
+is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least
+one of the results of a real psychical disturbance.  The highest
+gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such
+as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese.  Nevertheless it is
+no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited
+incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest
+intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume.
+All other societies die finally and with dignity.  We die daily.
+We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.
+It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic
+Christendom a sort of unnatural life:  it could be explained as a
+supernatural life.  It could be explained as an awful galvanic life
+working in what would have been a corpse.  For our civilization OUGHT
+to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability,
+in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome.  That is the weird inspiration
+of our estate:  you and I have no business to be here at all.  We are
+all REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about.
+Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria
+and Babylon, something entered into its body.  And Europe has had
+a strange life--it is not too much to say that it has had the JUMPS--
+ever since.
+
+     I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order
+to convey the main contention--that my own case for Christianity is
+rational; but it is not simple.  It is an accumulation of varied
+facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary
+agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a
+multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons.  He doubts because
+the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is
+demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they
+do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because
+nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because
+Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly
+bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving
+away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the
+supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.
+
+     But among these million facts all flowing one way there is,
+of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be
+treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence
+of the supernatural.  In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy
+of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it
+is orderly.  A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing
+as a disorderly thing.  But my own positive conviction that personal
+creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit,
+in a sense, undiscussable.  I will not call it a faith or an intuition,
+for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly
+an intellectual conviction; but it is a PRIMARY intellectual
+conviction like the certainty of self of the good of living.
+Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical;
+the phrase is not worth fighting about.  But my belief that miracles
+have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe
+in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.
+Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires
+to be stated and cleared up.  Somehow or other an extraordinary
+idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them
+coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only
+in connection with some dogma.  The fact is quite the other way.
+The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they
+have evidence for them.  The disbelievers in miracles deny them
+(rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
+The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman
+when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old
+apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.  The plain,
+popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost
+exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord.
+Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy
+agnosticism about both.  Still you could fill the British Museum with
+evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.
+If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human
+testimony in favour of the supernatural.  If you reject it, you can
+only mean one of two things.  You reject the peasant's story about
+the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story
+is a ghost story.  That is, you either deny the main principle
+of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism--
+the abstract impossibility of miracle.  You have a perfect right
+to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.  It is we
+Christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you rationalists
+who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.
+But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking
+impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times,
+I have come to the conclusion that they occurred.  All argument
+against these plain facts is always argument in a circle.  If I say,
+"Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest
+certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious";
+if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only
+ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.  If I say "a
+peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous."
+If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is--that they see ghosts.
+Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it;
+and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
+It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the
+unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself
+generally forgets to use it.
+
+     He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories
+a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance:  in short,
+that the miracle could only come to him who believed in it.
+It may be so, and if it is so how are we to test it?  If we are
+inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless
+to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith.
+If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a
+most healthy right to laugh.  But they have no right to judge.
+Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk;
+still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards,
+it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk.
+Suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red
+mist before their eyes.  Suppose sixty excellent householders swore
+that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud:  surely it would
+be absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time."
+They might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "How the blazes
+could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?"
+So the saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "Suppose that the
+question is whether believers can see visions--even then, if you
+are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers."
+You are still arguing in a circle--in that old mad circle with which this
+book began.
+
+     The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of
+common sense and of ordinary historical imagination:  not of any final
+physical experiment.  One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless
+piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions"
+in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena.  If we are asking
+whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous
+to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living
+souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other.
+The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence
+of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the
+existence of love.  If you choose to say, "I will believe that Miss
+Brown called her fiance a periwinkle or, any other endearing term,
+if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists,"
+then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions,
+you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it."
+It is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised
+that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies
+do not arise.  It is as if I said that I could not tell if there
+was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted
+on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.
+
+     As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come
+about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must
+in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen.
+I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts:  the fact that the men who
+encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers,
+but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious;
+the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents
+but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits
+such things more and more every day.  Science will even admit
+the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit
+the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.
+I suggest the Regalvanisation.  But the strongest of all is
+the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are
+never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of
+materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism.  The sceptic
+always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need
+not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.
+For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted
+in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or
+trick miracles.  That is not an argument at all, good or bad.
+A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as
+a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England--
+if anything, it proves its existence.
+
+     Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur
+(my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide
+with one of the worst mental evils of the age.  The greatest
+disaster of the nineteenth century was this:  that men began
+to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good."
+They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was
+to grow in virtue.  When scientific evolution was announced,
+some feared that it would encourage mere animality.  It did worse:
+it encouraged mere spirituality.  It taught men to think that so long
+as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.
+But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.  A man of genius,
+very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly.
+Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of
+the angels.  He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels.
+He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality;
+but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes
+of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery,
+and contempt of all obvious good.  Between this sunken pride
+and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose,
+spirits of shapes and sizes.  Man, in encountering them,
+must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering
+any other varied types in any other distant continent.  It must
+be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate.
+If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly,
+that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary
+closed carriage.  He would suppose that the coachman on the box
+was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and
+imprisoned captive.  So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time,
+we may mistake who is uppermost.  It is not enough to find the gods;
+they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods.
+We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena--
+in order to discover which are really natural.  In this light I
+find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
+quite practical and clear.  It does not trouble me to be told
+that the Hebrew god was one among many.  I know he was, without any
+research to tell me so.  Jehovah and Baal looked equally important,
+just as the sun and the moon looked the same size.  It is only
+slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master,
+and the small moon only our satellite.  Believing that there
+is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world
+of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good.
+Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at
+the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the
+land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water,
+and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity,
+where I am literally at home.  And there is only one such place to
+be found.
+
+     I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such
+an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena
+of apologetics, a ground of belief.  In pure records of experiment (if
+these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is
+evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler
+miracles belong to our tradition.  But I will not pretend that this curt
+discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking
+the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.
+
+     I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting
+to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it
+as a scheme.  And that is this:  that the Christian Church in its
+practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.
+It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly
+teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape
+of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape
+of the mitre.  One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed;
+some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven.  Plato has
+told you a truth; but Plato is dead.  Shakespeare has startled you
+with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more.
+But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living,
+to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow,
+or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a
+single song.  The man who lives in contact with what he believes
+to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato
+and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.  He is always expecting
+to see some truth that he has never seen before.  There is one
+only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel
+of the life in which we all began.  When your father told you,
+walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet,
+you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy.  When the
+bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence.
+When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude,
+barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep
+delicate truths that flowers smell."  No: you believed your father,
+because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing
+that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth
+to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father,
+it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine,
+to whom this book is dedicated.  Now, when society is in a rather
+futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much
+every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact
+that they alone rule education until education becomes futile:
+for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late
+to teach him anything.  The real thing has been done already,
+and thank God it is nearly always done by women.  Every man
+is womanised, merely by being born.  They talk of the masculine woman;
+but every man is a feminised man.  And if ever men walk to Westminster
+to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join
+their procession.
+
+     For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact;
+that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority,
+I was most full of flame and adventure.  Exactly because when my
+mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did
+come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me
+a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in
+some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true.  I went
+out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me,
+precisely because I had a clue to it:  if I had held no clue it would
+not have been terrible, but tame.  A mere unmeaning wilderness is
+not even impressive.  But the garden of childhood was fascinating,
+exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found
+out in its turn.  Inch by inch I might discover what was the object
+of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture
+as to why my parents kept a cat.
+
+     So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not
+merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world
+once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic
+shapes of cat and rake; I look at everything with the old elvish
+ignorance and expectancy.  This or that rite or doctrine may look
+as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience
+that such things end somehow in grass and flowers.  A clergyman may
+be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating,
+for there must be some strange reason for his existence.  I give
+one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive
+kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has
+certainly been a note of historic Christianity.  But when I look
+not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm
+is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note
+of high human nature in many spheres.  The Greeks felt virginity
+when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals,
+the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to
+the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world.
+Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence)
+has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence--
+the great modern worship of children.  For any man who loves children
+will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.
+With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority,
+I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather
+that I am defective, while the church is universal.  It takes
+all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate.
+But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates,
+I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music.  The best
+human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach.
+Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have
+not been told the sweet or terrible name.  But I may be told it
+any day.
+
+     This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting
+the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out
+of the religion.  I do it because the thing has not merely told this
+truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.
+All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true;
+only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does
+not seem to be true, but is true.  Alone of all creeds it is
+convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right,
+like my father in the garden.  Theosophists for instance will preach
+an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait
+for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the
+cruelty of caste.  For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins,
+people will tend to despise the beggar.  But Christianity preaches
+an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we
+wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder
+of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity
+the beggar and distrust the king.  Men of science offer us health,
+an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover
+that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
+Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only
+afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise
+highly beneficial to our health.  It is only afterwards that we
+realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance.
+The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness.
+The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be
+the very props of the people.  The outer ring of Christianity
+is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests;
+but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life
+dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity
+is the only frame for pagan freedom.  But in the modern philosophy
+the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously
+artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.
+
+     And its despair is this, that it does not really believe
+that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot
+hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots.  A man
+cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy.  But a man can
+expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land
+of authority.  One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism;
+but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through
+a forest of doctrine and design.  Here everything has a story tied
+to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house;
+for it is my father's house.  I end where I began--at the right end.
+I have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy.  I have come
+into my second childhood.
+
+     But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has
+one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole
+matter I will attempt to express it.  All the real argument about
+religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside
+down can tell when he comes right way up.  The primary paradox of
+Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane
+or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
+That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.  In Sir Oliver Lodge's
+interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were:
+"What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?"
+I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions;
+but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.
+To the question, "What are you?"  I could only answer, "God knows."
+And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?"  I could answer
+with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself."
+This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have
+never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves,
+but even more natural to us than ourselves.  And there is really
+no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these
+pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door.  It is only
+since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation.
+But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea
+of joy.
+
+     It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity
+of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure
+sorrow and Christianity pure joy.  Such conflicts mean nothing and
+lead nowhere.  Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow;
+the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things
+are balanced or divided.  And the really interesting thing is this,
+that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached
+the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.
+The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus
+or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten
+by a grateful humanity.  But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life,
+not about its origin.  To the pagan the small things are as sweet
+as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things
+are as bitter as the sea.  When the pagan looks at the very core of the
+cosmos he is struck cold.  Behind the gods, who are merely despotic,
+sit the fates, who are deadly.  Nay, the fates are worse than deadly;
+they are dead.  And when rationalists say that the ancient world
+was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view
+they are right.  For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened
+with incurable despair.  It is profoundly true that the ancient world
+was more modern than the Christian.  The common bond is in the fact
+that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence,
+about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least.
+I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable
+about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.
+I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at
+peace about everything--they were at war about everything else.
+But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos,
+then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody
+streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden
+of Epicurus.  Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides,
+but he lived in a gayer universe.
+
+     The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things,
+but sad about the big ones.  Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma
+defiantly) it is not native to man to be so.  Man is more himself,
+man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him,
+and grief the superficial.  Melancholy should be an innocent interlude,
+a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent
+pulsation of the soul.  Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday;
+joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.  Yet, according to
+the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic,
+this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled.
+Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted,
+it must cling to one corner of the world.  Grief ought to be
+a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread
+through an unthinkable eternity.  This is what I call being born
+upside down.  The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy;
+for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain
+is in the abyss.  To the modern man the heavens are actually below
+the earth.  The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head;
+which is a very weak pedestal to stand on.  But when he has found
+his feet again he knows it.  Christianity satisfies suddenly
+and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up;
+satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes
+something gigantic and sadness something special and small.
+The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot;
+the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.
+Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like
+the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy
+as a sort of merciful comedy:  because the frantic energy of divine
+things would knock us down like a drunken farce.  We can take our
+own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities
+of the angels.  So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence,
+while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
+
+     Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic
+secret of the Christian.  And as I close this chaotic volume I open
+again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I
+am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.  The tremendous figure
+which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other,
+above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.  His pathos
+was natural, almost casual.  The Stoics, ancient and modern,
+were proud of concealing their tears.  He never concealed His tears;
+He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as
+the far sight of His native city.  Yet He concealed something.
+Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining
+their anger.  He never restrained His anger.  He flung furniture
+down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected
+to escape the damnation of Hell.  Yet He restrained something.
+I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality
+a thread that must be called shyness.  There was something that He hid
+from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.  There was something
+that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.
+There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when
+He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was
+His mirth.
+
+
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