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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+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
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Orthodoxy
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2005 [EBook #16769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clare Coney and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ORTHODOXY
+
+_by_
+
+G.K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+JOHN LANE
+
+THE BODLEY HEAD LTD
+
+_First published in_.......................... 1908
+
+_printed_..................................... 1908
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1909
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1911
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1915
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1919
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1921
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1924
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1926
+
+_First published in "The Week-End Library" in_ 1927
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1934
+
+
+MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+_TO MY MOTHER_
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+     _Chap._                                  _Page_
+
+     I. INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE    11
+
+     II. THE MANIAC ................................  20
+
+     III. THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT ...................  50
+
+     IV. THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND .....................  76
+
+     V. THE FLAG OF THE WORLD ......................  117
+
+     VI. THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY .............  146
+
+     VII. THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION ...................  186
+
+     VIII. THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY ................  228
+
+     IX. AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER ..............  259
+
+
+
+
+_ORTHODOXY_
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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. Dullness
+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
+vain-glory, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 æsthetic 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 praise, 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, the man who 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 out-stripping 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
+simple-minded 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 cross-roads, 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 Jésus." 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 heart-breaking 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 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 ecstacy 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 ecstacy
+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 æsthetes 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 is 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
+lifeguardsman. 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 of the mystic and the arbitary. 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, arbitarily, 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 civilisation 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 neutralise 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 cross-roads 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 mediæval 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
+recognised 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 that 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 organising 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
+civilisation 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 civilisation 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 Galilæan, 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
+Galilæan 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 monastries 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 Lion 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 _entrées_.
+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 _entrées_, 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 μεσον 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
+μεσον 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 grey 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,
+_quâ_ 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 æsthetic 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 théatre_ 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 grey. 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 co-existent 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 as exactly 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 mediæval 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 materials 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 realised (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 realised, or even partly realised. 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 anything 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, not 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 Nietzscheian 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 mediæval 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 motor-cars; 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 recognised 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 grey
+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 free-thinker 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 a 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 mediæval 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 of 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
+æon 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
+mediæval 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 emphasise possible perdition; and Europe
+always has emphasised 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 æons 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 civilisation, 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
+civilisation 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 courage and common
+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 and 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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
+transcendant 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 civilisation 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 civilisation; but
+that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. 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 civilisations. If any one says that the faith
+arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It
+arose in the Mediterranean civilisation 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 débris 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 civilisation 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 encyclopædias. 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 mediæval 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 civilisation
+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 civilisations 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 civilisation _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 or 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 evidence 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 mediæval 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, "Mediæval
+documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain
+battles," they answer, "But mediævals 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 _fiancé_ 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 spiritualist 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 least 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 mediævals 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 ecstacies,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+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
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Orthodoxy
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2005 [EBook #16769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clare Coney and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ORTHODOXY
+
+_by_
+
+G.K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+JOHN LANE
+
+THE BODLEY HEAD LTD
+
+_First published in_.......................... 1908
+
+_printed_..................................... 1908
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1909
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1911
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1915
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1919
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1921
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1924
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1926
+
+_First published in "The Week-End Library" in_ 1927
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1934
+
+
+MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+_TO MY MOTHER_
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+     _Chap._                                  _Page_
+
+     I. INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE    11
+
+     II. THE MANIAC ................................  20
+
+     III. THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT ...................  50
+
+     IV. THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND .....................  76
+
+     V. THE FLAG OF THE WORLD ......................  117
+
+     VI. THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY .............  146
+
+     VII. THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION ...................  186
+
+     VIII. THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY ................  228
+
+     IX. AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER ..............  259
+
+
+
+
+_ORTHODOXY_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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. Dullness
+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
+vain-glory, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 æsthetic 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 praise, 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, the man who 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 out-stripping 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
+simple-minded 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 cross-roads, 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 Jésus." 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 heart-breaking 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 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 ecstacy 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 ecstacy
+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 æsthetes 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 is 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
+lifeguardsman. 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 of the mystic and the arbitary. 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, arbitarily, 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 civilisation 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 neutralise 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 cross-roads 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 mediæval 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
+recognised 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 that 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 organising 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
+civilisation 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 civilisation 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 Galilæan, 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
+Galilæan 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 monastries 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 Lion 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 _entrées_.
+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 _entrées_, 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 [Greek: 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 [Greek: 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 grey 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,
+_quâ_ 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 æsthetic 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 théatre_ 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 grey. 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 co-existent 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 as exactly 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 mediæval 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 materials 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 realised (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 realised, or even partly realised. 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 anything 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, not 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 Nietzscheian 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 mediæval 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 motor-cars; 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 recognised 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 grey
+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 free-thinker 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 a 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 mediæval 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 of 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
+æon 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
+mediæval 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 emphasise possible perdition; and Europe
+always has emphasised 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 æons 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 civilisation, 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
+civilisation 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 courage and common
+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 and 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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
+transcendant 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 civilisation 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 civilisation; but
+that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. 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 civilisations. If any one says that the faith
+arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It
+arose in the Mediterranean civilisation 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 débris 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 civilisation 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 encyclopædias. 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 mediæval 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 civilisation
+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 civilisations 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 civilisation _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 or 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 evidence 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 mediæval 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, "Mediæval
+documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain
+battles," they answer, "But mediævals 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 _fiancé_ 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 spiritualist 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 least 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 mediævals 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 ecstacies,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY ***
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
+    "text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+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
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Orthodoxy
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2005 [EBook #16769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clare Coney and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>ORTHODOXY</h1>
+
+<h3 align="center"><i>by</i></h3>
+
+<h3 align="center">G. K. CHESTERTON</h3>
+
+
+<br />
+
+<h4 align="center">JOHN LANE<br>THE BODLEY HEAD LTD</h4>
+<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p><i>First published in</i>.................................................. 1908</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1908</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1909</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1911</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1915</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1919</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1921</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1924</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1926</p>
+
+<p><i>First published in &quot;The Week-End Library&quot; in</i> 1927</p>
+
+<p><i>Reprinted</i>................................................................ 1934</p>
+<br />
+</div>
+
+
+<h4 align="center">MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+LONDON AND BECCLES.</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="TO_MY_MOTHER"></a><h2><i>TO MY MOTHER</i></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CONTENTS"></a><h2><i>CONTENTS</i></h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<div class="blkquot">
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_I_Introduction_in_Defence_of_Everything_Else"><b>CHAPTER I.&mdash;<i>Introduction in Defence of Everything Else</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_II_The_Maniac"><b>CHAPTER II.&mdash;<i>The Maniac</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_III_The_Suicide_of_Thought"><b>CHAPTER III.&mdash;<i>The Suicide of Thought</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IV_The_Ethics_of_Elfland"><b>CHAPTER IV&mdash;<i>The Ethics of Elfland</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_V_The_Flag_of_the_World"><b>CHAPTER V.&mdash;<i>The Flag of the World</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VI_The_Paradoxes_of_Christianity"><b>CHAPTER VI.&mdash;<i>The Paradoxes of Christianity</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VII_The_Eternal_Revolution"><b>CHAPTER VII.&mdash;<i>The Eternal Revolution</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII_The_Romance_of_Orthodoxy"><b>CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;<i>The Romance of Orthodoxy</i></b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IX_Authority_and_the_Adventurer"><b>CHAPTER IX.&mdash;<i>Authority and the Adventurer</i></b></a><br />
+</div>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_I_Introduction_in_Defence_of_Everything_Else"></a><h2>CHAPTER I.&mdash;<i>Introduction in Defence of Everything Else</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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 &quot;Heretics,&quot; 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. &quot;I
+will begin to worry about my philosophy,&quot; said Mr. Street, &quot;when Mr.
+Chesterton has given us his.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;romance&quot; 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 <i>this</i> achievement of my creed that I shall
+chiefly pursue in these pages.</p>
+
+<p>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. Dullness
+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
+vain-glory, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;orthodoxy&quot; 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_II_The_Maniac"></a><h2>CHAPTER II.&mdash;<i>The Maniac</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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, &quot;That man will get on; he
+believes in himself.&quot; And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen,
+my eye caught an omnibus on which was written &quot;Hanwell.&quot; I said to him,
+&quot;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.&quot; He said
+mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in
+themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. &quot;Yes, there are,&quot; I
+retorted, &quot;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.&quot; And to all this my friend the publisher made
+this very deep and effective reply, &quot;Well, if a man is not to believe in
+himself, in what is he to believe?&quot; After a long pause I replied, &quot;I
+will go home and write a book in answer to that question.&quot; This is the
+book that I have written in answer to it.</p>
+
+<p>But I think this book may well start where our argument started&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Great genius is to madness near
+allied.&quot; 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, &quot;Great wits are oft to madness near allied&quot;;
+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, &quot;As mad as a hatter.&quot; A more flippant person might answer
+that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Clarion</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>mark</i> 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: &quot;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.&quot; Or suppose it were
+the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your
+impulse would be to answer, &quot;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.&quot; Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself
+Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, &quot;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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <i>head</i> 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&mdash;or into Hanwell.</p>
+
+<p>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 &aelig;sthetic 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;chain&quot; 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 praise, 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 &quot;thank
+you&quot; for the mustard.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Go
+and sin no more,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;He
+believes in himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, the man who 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
+&quot;if you please&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_III_The_Suicide_of_Thought"></a><h2>CHAPTER III.&mdash;<i>The Suicide of Thought</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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 &quot;put out&quot; or &quot;off colour&quot; 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 &quot;his heart in the right
+place.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 out-stripping 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&mdash;even pride.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;himself. The part he doubts is
+exactly the part he ought not to doubt&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Why should
+<i>anything</i> 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?&quot; The young sceptic says, &quot;I have a right to
+think for myself.&quot; But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, &quot;I
+have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Doubts of
+the Instrument.&quot; 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;I think;
+therefore I am.&quot; The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the
+epigram. He says, &quot;I am not; therefore I cannot think.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.
+Wells when he insists that every separate thing is &quot;unique,&quot; 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), &quot;All chairs are quite
+different,&quot; he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in
+terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them &quot;all
+chairs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;What is right in one age is wrong in another.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;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.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+simple-minded 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, &quot;Jam will
+make me happy,&quot; but &quot;I want jam.&quot; 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, &quot;I <i>feel</i> this curve is right,&quot; or
+&quot;that line <i>shall</i> go thus.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;willing&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Will
+something,&quot; that is tantamount to saying, &quot;I do not mind what you
+will,&quot; and that is tantamount to saying, &quot;I have no will in the matter.&quot;
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;Thou shalt not&quot;; but it is surely obvious that &quot;Thou shalt not&quot; is only
+one of the necessary corollaries of &quot;I will.&quot; &quot;I will go to the Lord
+Mayor's Show, and thou shalt not stop me.&quot; 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 &quot;The Loves of the
+Triangles&quot;; 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 <i>thing</i> he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat.
+The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>not</i> 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 &quot;revolutionise&quot; 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 <i>not</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 cross-roads, and one hates all the roads and
+the other likes all the roads. The result is&mdash;well, some things are not
+hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.</p>
+
+<p>Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book&mdash;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&mdash;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 &quot;Jeanne d'Arc,&quot; by Anatole France. I
+have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan's
+&quot;Vie de J&eacute;sus.&quot; 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
+<i>know</i> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV_The_Ethics_of_Elfland"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV&mdash;<i>The Ethics of Elfland</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is
+commonly in some such speech as this: &quot;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.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 heart-breaking 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;appreciate Nature,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Jack the Giant Killer&quot;; 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 &quot;Cinderella,&quot; which is the
+same as that of the Magnificat&mdash;<i>exaltavit humiles.</i> There is the great
+lesson of &quot;Beauty and the Beast&quot;; that a thing must be loved <i>before</i>
+it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the &quot;Sleeping Beauty,&quot;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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) <i>necessary</i> 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&mdash;dawn and death and so on&mdash;as
+if <i>they</i> were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that
+trees bear fruit were just as <i>necessary</i> 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
+<i>imagine</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales.
+The man of science says, &quot;Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall&quot;; but
+he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The
+witch in the fairy tale says, &quot;Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will
+fall&quot;; 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.</p>
+
+<p>In fairyland we avoid the word &quot;law&quot;; 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 <i>ideas</i>, the egg and the chicken are further off 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 &quot;Laws of Nature.&quot; 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 <i>magic</i>. It is not a &quot;law,&quot; 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, &quot;law,&quot; &quot;necessity,&quot; &quot;order,&quot; &quot;tendency,&quot; 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, &quot;charm,&quot;
+&quot;spell,&quot; &quot;enchantment.&quot; They express the arbitrariness of the fact and
+its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a <i>magic</i> tree. Water runs
+downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
+bewitched.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;a law&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 ecstacy only means
+that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.</p>
+
+<p>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 ecstacy
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;What did the first frog say?&quot; And the
+answer was, &quot;Lord, how you made me jump!&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Any one can see it who will simply read &quot;Grimm's Fairy Tales&quot; 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 &quot;if&quot;; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an &quot;if.&quot;
+The note of the fairy utterance always is, &quot;You may live in a palace of
+gold and sapphire, <i>if</i> you do not say the word 'cow'&quot;; or &quot;You may live
+happily with the King's daughter, <i>if</i> you do not show her an onion.&quot;
+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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,<br /></span>
+<span>And dance upon the mountains like a flame.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which might have come out of Brixton&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>not doing something</i> 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 <i>me</i> this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to
+the fairy, &quot;Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy
+palace,&quot; the other might fairly reply, &quot;Well, if it comes to that,
+explain the fairy palace.&quot; If Cinderella says, &quot;How is it that I must
+leave the ball at twelve?&quot; her godmother might answer, &quot;How is it that
+you are going there till twelve?&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>revolt</i>. 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 &aelig;sthetes 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>done</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Do
+it again&quot;; 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, &quot;Do it again&quot; to the sun; and every
+evening, &quot;Do it again&quot; 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 <i>encore</i>. Heaven may <i>encore</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>wilful</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 is 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its
+crowd of varied creatures.&quot; But if it comes to that why should not a man
+say, &quot;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&quot;? 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?</p>
+
+<p>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
+lifeguardsman. 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 &quot;Tiny.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Robinson Crusoe,&quot;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_V_The_Flag_of_the_World"></a><h2>CHAPTER V.&mdash;<i>The Flag of the World</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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, &quot;An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
+is a man who looks after your feet.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing&mdash;say Pimlico.
+If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of
+thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitary. 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, arbitarily, because it is <i>theirs</i> 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 civilisation 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;I will not hit you if you do not hit me&quot;;
+there is no trace of such a transaction. There <i>is</i> a trace of both men
+having said, &quot;We must not hit each other in the holy place.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he
+is not candid. He is keeping something back&mdash;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, &quot;I am sorry to say we are ruined,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men,
+but that he does not love what he chastises&mdash;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, &quot;My cosmos, right or wrong.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &quot;My son give me thy
+heart&quot;; 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Enough we live:&mdash;and if a life,<br /></span>
+<span>With large results so little rife,<br /></span>
+<span>Though bearable, seem hardly worth<br /></span>
+<span>This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 neutralise 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;poor fellow,&quot; 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&mdash;for it makes even crimes impossible.</p>
+
+<p>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 cross-roads to show
+what Christianity thought of the pessimist.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val 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
+recognised an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible
+as an army with banners.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>the</i> answer. It was the answer then, and I think
+it is the answer now.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>in</i> 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 <i>idea</i> 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 &quot;thrown
+off.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;it had evidently been meant to go there&mdash;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 that 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>wrong</i> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI_The_Paradoxes_of_Christianity"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI.&mdash;<i>The Paradoxes of Christianity</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 organising expeditions to find a
+man's heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the
+wrong side of him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Why do you prefer
+civilisation to savagery?&quot; he would look wildly round at object after
+object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, &quot;Why, there is that
+bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ... and
+policemen.&quot; The whole case for civilisation 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, &quot;Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.&quot; I
+was in a desperate way.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands,&quot; 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&quot;Thou hast conquered, O pale Galil&aelig;an, the world has grown gray
+     with Thy breath.&quot; </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as in &quot;Atalanta&quot;),
+I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the
+Galil&aelig;an 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Christian,&quot; 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 monastries 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 Lion 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 &quot;Thou shalt not steal.&quot; It might decipher the darkest
+hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when
+deciphered would be &quot;Little boys should tell the truth.&quot; I believed this
+doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral
+sense, and I believe it still&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;only women&quot; 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, &quot;One thinks one thing, and one
+another,&quot; and rebuked also for its union, &quot;It is difference of opinion
+that prevents the world from going to the dogs.&quot; In the same
+conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for
+despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>They</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <i>entr&eacute;es</i>.
+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 <i>entr&eacute;es</i>, not in the bread and wine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#956;&#949;&#963;&#959;&#957; 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
+&#956;&#949;&#963;&#959;&#957; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &quot;He that
+will lose his life, the same shall save it,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the &quot;resignation&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>a</i> 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&mdash;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 grey ashes of
+St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think
+of <i>one's self</i>, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak
+abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let
+himself go&mdash;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,
+<i>qu&acirc;</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &aelig;sthetic 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 &quot;Odyssey.&quot;
+He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being
+outside patriotism he is outside &quot;Henry V.&quot; 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? <i>This</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>coup de th&eacute;atre</i> of
+morality&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing
+but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the
+faith. It <i>is</i> 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 grey. 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 co-existent 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.</p>
+
+<p>So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the
+anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It <i>is</i> true that the
+Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it <i>is</i> 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 <i>some</i> good in
+the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.
+There must be <i>some</i> 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&mdash;Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still
+retain his royal ferocity? <i>That</i> is the problem the Church attempted;
+<i>that</i> is the miracle she achieved.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;<i>that</i> 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 <i>may</i> be quite
+miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy&mdash;that was a
+discovery in psychology. Any one might say, &quot;Neither swagger nor
+grovel&quot;; and it would have been a limit. But to say, &quot;Here you can
+swagger and there you can grovel&quot;&mdash;that was an emancipation.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;You shall all be
+Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and
+reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift.&quot; But the instinct
+of Christian Europe says, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 as exactly 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII_The_Eternal_Revolution"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII.&mdash;<i>The Eternal Revolution</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, &quot;If these were silent, the very stones would cry
+out.&quot; Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the
+facades of the medi&aelig;val cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and
+open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.</p>
+
+<p>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), &quot;The Old Man.&quot; 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 &quot;high.&quot; It is at least the
+reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a
+weathercock. &quot;Tommy was a good boy&quot; is a pure philosophical statement,
+worthy of Plato or Aquinas. &quot;Tommy lived the higher life&quot; is a gross
+metaphor from a ten-foot rule.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;beyond good and evil,&quot; because he had not the courage to say, &quot;more
+good than good and evil,&quot; or, &quot;more evil than good and evil.&quot; 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, &quot;the
+purer man,&quot; or &quot;the happier man,&quot; or &quot;the sadder man,&quot; for all these are
+ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says &quot;the upper man,&quot; or &quot;over man,&quot; 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 &quot;higher,&quot; do not
+know either.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>that</i> 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 materials 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 realised (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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's
+factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office&mdash;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 realised, or even partly realised. The modern young man will never
+change his environment; for he will always change his mind.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Slavery suited one stage of evolution.&quot; And suppose he
+answers, &quot;And sweating suits this stage of evolution.&quot; 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&mdash;the morality
+that is always running away?</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Where
+do you draw the line?&quot; the Revolutionist answers, &quot;I draw it <i>here</i>:
+exactly between your head and body.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;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 anything 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.&quot; I
+paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity: but I passed on.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;then there is an artist.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;Thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed&quot;: 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, not 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 Nietzscheian line of development&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact answer
+that I required. I had said, &quot;The ideal must be fixed,&quot; and the Church
+had answered, &quot;Mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything
+else.&quot; I said secondly, &quot;It must be artistically combined, like a
+picture&quot;; and the Church answered, &quot;Mine is quite literally a picture,
+for I know who painted it.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity spoke again and said, &quot;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&mdash;the Fall.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;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.&quot; 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, &quot;Very well, then, we won't trust them,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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, &quot;I respect
+that man's rank, although he takes bribes.&quot; But a Christian cannot say,
+as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, &quot;a man of that rank
+would not take bribes.&quot; 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 &quot;in that position&quot; 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 <i>any</i> man in <i>any</i> position at <i>any</i> moment; especially for my
+fall from my position at this moment.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;that the
+man should rule who does <i>not</i> think that he can rule. Carlyle's hero
+may say, &quot;I will be king&quot;; but the Christian saint must say, &quot;Nolo
+episcopari.&quot; If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it
+means this&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, &quot;Friend, go up higher.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern
+&quot;force&quot; 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 &quot;levitation.&quot; 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 medi&aelig;val 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 &quot;settles down&quot; into a
+sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay
+self-forgetfulness. A man &quot;falls&quot; 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 <i>Times</i> leading
+article than a good joke in <i>Punch</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings.&quot;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>real</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII_The_Romance_of_Orthodoxy"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;<i>The Romance of Orthodoxy</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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 motor-cars; 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 &quot;The social utility of the indeterminate sentence
+is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological
+evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,&quot; you
+can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey
+matter inside your skull. But if you begin &quot;I wish Jones to go to gaol
+and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,&quot; 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 &quot;damn&quot; than in the word
+&quot;degeneration.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;idealist&quot; 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 &quot;materialist&quot; as a term of cosmology with
+&quot;materialist&quot; as a moral taunt. So, to take a cheaper instance, the man
+who hates &quot;progressives&quot; in London always calls himself a &quot;progressive&quot;
+in South Africa.</p>
+
+<p>A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the
+word &quot;liberal&quot; 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 free-thinker 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;broad&quot; or
+&quot;liberal&quot; 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 &quot;miracles do not
+happen,&quot; as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith.
+More supernatural things are <i>alleged</i> 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 &quot;free&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 &quot;liberal theologians.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 a 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.</p>
+
+<p>But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion
+that the &quot;liberalising&quot; of religion in some way helps the liberation of
+the world. The second example of it can be found in the question of
+pantheism&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but
+they are the same in what they teach.&quot; It is false; it is the opposite
+of the fact. The religions of the earth do <i>not</i> greatly differ in rites
+and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man
+were to say, &quot;Do not be misled by the fact that the <i>Church Times</i> and
+the <i>Freethinker</i> 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.&quot;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;little children love one another&quot;
+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 of 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
+&aelig;on 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.</p>
+
+<p>This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the
+medi&aelig;val 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 &quot;Songs before Sunrise,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;What doest thou now<br /></span>
+<span>Looking Godward to cry<br /></span>
+<span>I am I, thou art thou,<br /></span>
+<span>I am low, thou art high,<br /></span>
+<span>I am thou that thou seekest to find him, find thou<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">but thyself, thou art I,&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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, &quot;found himself&quot; 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 &quot;I am I,
+thou art thou.&quot; 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 <i>watch</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God
+we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous
+indignation&mdash;Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is
+always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has
+transcended himself.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>heart</i> 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 &quot;it is not well for man to be
+alone.&quot; 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)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 emphasise possible perdition; and Europe
+always has emphasised 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 <i>story</i>, 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
+<i>might</i> 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 &quot;damned&quot;: but it
+is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.</p>
+
+<p>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 &aelig;ons 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 <i>danger</i> 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) &quot;to be continued in our
+next.&quot; Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and
+leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be
+profligates.&quot; 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; &quot;patient&quot;
+is in the passive mood; &quot;sinner&quot; 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 <i>impatient</i>. He must be
+personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the
+active not the passive will.</p>
+
+<p>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 civilisation, 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 <i>make</i> them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, &quot;Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;yes, and
+their last arrows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their
+civilisation 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 courage and common
+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 and 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX_Authority_and_the_Adventurer"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX.&mdash;<i>Authority and the Adventurer</i></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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
+transcendant 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 civilisation 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 <i>rules</i> of a club are
+occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always
+in favour of the rich one.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;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?&quot; This is the real question; this is the last question;
+and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in
+Christianity, I can only answer, &quot;For the same reason that an
+intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.&quot; 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 civilisation; but
+that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;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.&quot; 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 &quot;psychic.&quot; 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 &quot;Japan has become progressive,&quot; we really only mean,
+&quot;Japan has become European&quot;? 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;such people as
+the Irish&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>a fortiori</i>.
+His &quot;how much more&quot; is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in
+the clouds. The diction used <i>about</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 civilisations. If any one says that the faith
+arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It
+arose in the Mediterranean civilisation 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 d&eacute;bris 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 civilisation 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>done</i> 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 <i>hard</i> professions&mdash;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 encyclop&aelig;dias. 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 medi&aelig;val darkness and the
+political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to
+ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, &quot;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 civilisation
+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?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 civilisations 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 civilisation <i>ought</i>
+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
+<i>revenants</i>; 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&mdash;it
+is not too much to say that it has had the <i>jumps</i>&mdash;ever since.</p>
+
+<p>I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to
+convey the main contention&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>primary</i> intellectual conviction like the certainty of self or 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 evidence 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&mdash;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&mdash;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 medi&aelig;val 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, &quot;Medi&aelig;val
+documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain
+battles,&quot; they answer, &quot;But medi&aelig;vals were superstitious&quot;; if I want to
+know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that
+they believed in the miracles. If I say &quot;a peasant saw a ghost,&quot; I am
+told, &quot;But peasants are so credulous.&quot; If I ask, &quot;Why credulous?&quot; the
+only answer is&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Oh, but you
+admit you were angry at the time.&quot; They might reasonably rejoin (in a
+stentorian chorus), &quot;How the blazes could we discover, without being
+angry, whether angry people see red?&quot; So the saints and ascetics might
+rationally reply, &quot;Suppose that the question is whether believers can
+see visions&mdash;even then, if you are interested in visions it is no point
+to object to believers.&quot; You are still arguing in a circle&mdash;in that old
+mad circle with which this book began.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;scientific conditions&quot; 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, &quot;I will believe that Miss Brown called her <i>fianc&eacute;</i> a
+periwinkle or any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word
+before seventeen psychologists,&quot; then I shall reply, &quot;Very well, if
+those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she
+certainly will not say it.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 spiritualist 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&mdash;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&mdash;if anything, it proves its existence.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;spiritual&quot; as the same
+as the word &quot;good.&quot; 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;My
+father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously)
+the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;at
+the right end. I have entered at least the gate of all good philosophy.
+I have come into my second childhood.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;What are you?&quot; and &quot;What, then, is the meaning of the
+Fall of Man?&quot; 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, &quot;What are you?&quot; I could only answer, &quot;God
+knows.&quot; And to the question, &quot;What is meant by the Fall?&quot; I could answer
+with complete sincerity, &quot;That whatever I am, I am not myself.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;enlightened&quot; 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 medi&aelig;vals were happy about that at
+least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only
+miserable about everything&mdash;they were quite jolly about everything else.
+I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace
+about everything&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 ecstacies,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
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diff --git a/16769.txt b/16769.txt
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+++ b/16769.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5886 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+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
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Orthodoxy
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2005 [EBook #16769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORTHODOXY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clare Coney and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ORTHODOXY
+
+_by_
+
+G.K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+JOHN LANE
+
+THE BODLEY HEAD LTD
+
+_First published in_.......................... 1908
+
+_printed_..................................... 1908
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1909
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1911
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1915
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1919
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1921
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1924
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1926
+
+_First published in "The Week-End Library" in_ 1927
+
+_Reprinted_................................... 1934
+
+
+MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+_TO MY MOTHER_
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+     _Chap._                                  _Page_
+
+     I. INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE    11
+
+     II. THE MANIAC ................................  20
+
+     III. THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT ...................  50
+
+     IV. THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND .....................  76
+
+     V. THE FLAG OF THE WORLD ......................  117
+
+     VI. THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY .............  146
+
+     VII. THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION ...................  186
+
+     VIII. THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY ................  228
+
+     IX. AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER ..............  259
+
+
+
+
+_ORTHODOXY_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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. Dullness
+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
+vain-glory, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 praise, 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, the man who 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 out-stripping 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
+simple-minded 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 cross-roads, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 heart-breaking 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 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 ecstacy 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 ecstacy
+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 is 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
+lifeguardsman. 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 of the mystic and the arbitary. 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, arbitarily, 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 civilisation 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 neutralise 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 cross-roads 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
+recognised 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 that 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 organising 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
+civilisation 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 civilisation 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
+Galilaean 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 monastries 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 Lion 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 [Greek: 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 [Greek: 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 grey 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 grey. 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 co-existent 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 as exactly 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 materials 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 realised (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 realised, or even partly realised. 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 anything 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, not 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 Nietzscheian 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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 motor-cars; 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 recognised 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 grey
+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 free-thinker 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 a 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 of 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 emphasise possible perdition; and Europe
+always has emphasised 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 civilisation, 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
+civilisation 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 courage and common
+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 and 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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
+transcendant 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 civilisation 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 civilisation; but
+that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. 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 civilisations. If any one says that the faith
+arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It
+arose in the Mediterranean civilisation 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 civilisation 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 encyclopaedias. 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 civilisation
+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 civilisations 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 civilisation _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 or 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 evidence 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 spiritualist 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 least 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 ecstacies,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
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