 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by J. A. Carter. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 7 The Eternal Revolution. Part 1 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. Former 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 medieval 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 merely argument in a circle, that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and 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 today 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 exalt 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 God. 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 caliber 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 favorite 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 as 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 Nishi 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. Nishi always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery modern 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 pure 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. Nishi 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 is 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 they happen to want and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people. This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution to work for what you want and to call that evolution. The only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men is that we have a definite vision and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create. This is not a world but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors 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 that 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 toward 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's 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 pudding of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams, the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked harm, 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 favorite color every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favorite color 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 earlier 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 engraved changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black and white epic when men believed fixedly in tourism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in reform, and not unfrequently in revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily without skepticism, and there was a time when the established church might have fallen and the house of lords nearly fell. It was because radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent. It was because radicals were wise enough to be conservative. But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion, made in a fine speech, that the era of change is over and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized, what is certainly the case, that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, collectivism, Tolstoyanism, neo-feudalism, communism, anarchy, scientific bureaucracy, the plain fruit of all of them is that the monarchy and the house of lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the church of England will not, for heaven knows how long, be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nishi, Tolstoy, Cunningham Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Aberon 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 of liberty. But the men we see every day, the worker and Mr. Grad Grine's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Grad Grine'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 Nishiite 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 Grad Grine. It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helletry supplied with skeptical literature. And now I come to think of it, of course Grad Grine is famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment, for he will always change his mind. This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal toward 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 of 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 the window, instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out the 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 toward 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 toward morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great disadvantage to this theory. It talks of a slow movement toward 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 circumstances, 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 handsome cab, when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little fast, or the cab man'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 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 favorite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the ax. The evolutionist says, Where do you draw the line? The revolutionist answers, I draw it here, exactly between your head and your body. There must be at any given moment 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 rounding a system forever 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 pause 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 true 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 toward one consummation, but hardly toward 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 colors 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 churro scurro, 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 whatnot, 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 men ever added 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 Sibley. 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 most of us want to say to our noses thus far and no farther, and here shout thy proud point bestaid. We require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face. But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend toward 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 adrift. 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 incommoting a microbe. To so crude a consummation is that we might perhaps unconsciously drift, but do we want so crude a consummation? Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the opposite or Nietzschean 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 wander and haughty enough to defy. So our attitude to the giant of the world must not be merely 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. CHAPTER VII 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 complete happiness. If the beautification 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 beautification 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 by my kind of progress. The progress toward 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 color to the many-colored 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 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 a progressive, it is also the only argument against being a 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 always be painting it again. That is, you must always be having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post. But this which is true of even inanimate things, is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things, and 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 in 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 I. 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 Guillotine. So in the same way in England in the 19th 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 minute 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 anyone 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 lookout 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 from 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 that 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 that 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 disenfranchise 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 reasonably 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 apologizing 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 all 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 fowl? 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 manufacturer 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 as 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 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 boot black? Was the Duke of Marlboro 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 quarreled. 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 Carlisle, the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is he, then. 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. Carlisle's hero may say, I will be king, but the Christian saint must say, Nolo Episcopare. 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 in dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlisle 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 defenses of working democracy. The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to affect 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 Hindu 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 peculiarly 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 weak. The bird can of its nature go upwards because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity and 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 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 very earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies of quick and capering feet? It was the one thing that the modern Pre-Raphaelites would not imitate in the real Pre-Raphaelites. Bern 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 raid plumes of the angels. But the kings and their heavy gold and the proud and their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downward, but 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 oneself gravely because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good times-leading article than a good joke and 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 honor 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 anyone 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 case 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 a 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 Neschiite, 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 and 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 at a thousand years old. For me, in the ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer, Prevent us, oh 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 an inch by inch my own conception of Utopia was only answered by 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's 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 worthwhile 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 fairytale 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 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 in the 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 specialties. 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. End of Chapter 7 Part 2 It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epic. But in truth, the chief mark of our epic 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. The 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 toward a more humane and scientific view of punishment. You can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin, I wish Jones to go to Gale 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 which 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 free thinkers 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 just as well say that low churchmen ought to like low mass or the 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 order of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality, and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. May indeed almost all these ideas are definitely ill-liberal, 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 liberalizers of theology, their effect on social practice would be definitely ill-liberal. 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 fashion 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 anyone else 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 their 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 Saint Peter walked on water. It 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 honest. On the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards. Here we are only concerned with this clear point, that insofar as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side of 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, 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 honorable 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 ableist men. For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty, old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature. He seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favorite 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 liberalizing 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 eminentism 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 free thinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hecticogonal, read them and you will see that they say the same thing. The truth is, of course, that they are all like and everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in Serbotin looks exactly like a sweet Borgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. He may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything sweet Borgian 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 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 Mohammedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes. They seldom suggest the Mohammedan way of marriage, for which there is a great deal to be said, and toward the thugs and fetish-worsippers their attitude may even be cold. But in the case of the great religion of Guatama, 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, 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 shop. 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 purile pedantry would indeed matter little, if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kind, 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 unscholally people, that Buddhism and Christianity were like, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me. I mean, the startling difference in their types of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style a 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 his very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bone, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produce 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. 8. The Romance of Orthodoxy Part 2 A short time ago, Mrs. Bazant, 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. Bazant, 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 neighbors, she tells us to be our neighbors. That is Mrs. Bazant'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 neighbor 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. Bazant'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's soul of the theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it, but the divine center 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 would 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 declared that the Son of God came not with peace, but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true, even considered as what it obviously is, the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love. Sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy, but real love has always ended in bloodshed. Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord. According to himself the Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other. But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother so that they should love each other at last. This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the medieval 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 outward toward 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 or 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. Swineburn, in the high summer of his skepticism, 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 pure God which would wither up all the priests of the world. What dost 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 Garibaldi's, and that King Bomba of Naples, having with the utmost success found himself, is identical with the ultimate good of 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 worshipers of Bomba's God dethroned Bomba. The worshipers 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 Christianity 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 in the new. If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy, especially in this matter so much disputed in the councils of Mr. R. J. Campbell, the matter of insisting on the imminent or the transcendent deity, by insisting especially on the eminence of God, we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference, Tibet. By insisting especially 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 honor, 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 Muhammad. 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 around 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 Cimitar 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 favorable 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 cling to a precipice. To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark, but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition, and Europe always has emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the Eastern fatalist, existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian, existence is a story which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel, that purely Christian product, the hero is not eaten by cannibals, but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must, so to speak, be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man damned, but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable. All Christianity concentrates on the man at the crossroads. 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. Anyone 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 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 is 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 a hospital. Patient is in the passive mood. Sinner is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he must be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must not be 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 dangerous revolutions which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage the thought of possible ruin. We shall rather encourage it. If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly want to make them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong. Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The thing may be true or not. That I shall deal with before I end. But if the divinity is true, it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we already knew. But that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God to be holy 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 apologize 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 as 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 spin their whole lives in shooting arrows at it. Yes, and their last arrows. There are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith, that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers and the fire-brans 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 maneuvering 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 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 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 for 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 someone who never lived at all. And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. His opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy. They only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God. How could they prove it? They only prove from their premises that the Tsar 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 have been 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 paralyzing 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 Snellgrove. Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but it's foes of 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. 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 especially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practice, we cannot help it much by insisting on the eminent God and the inner light, for these are at best reasons for contentment. We can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam, for that means divine discontent. If we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance between that of a dreadful autocracy, we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire a European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor, we shall be in favor of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favor of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favor 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 worshipers of a personal God look outward 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 Kant 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 better deal with man's exercise of free will 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 summarize 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 today 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 discovered 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 their 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 humor 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 this divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brood are like is, in a sense, a truism, but that being so like they should 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 Rococo style. Camels do not paint even bad pictures, although equipped with the material of many camel's hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have indeed a civilization, but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Whoever found an ant hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants, who has seen a beehive 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 prehistoric man, for the excellent reason that he is prehistoric. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent in 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 earlier 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 prehistoric 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 in colored 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 around 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 out, 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 center of the island and their song had ceased. Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make it agnostic, are in this view turned totally around. 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 upon my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street and being guided by three or four odd facts all pointed to something. Only when I came to look at the facts I always found them pointing 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 or 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 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 in an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid derision, flinging down tables, casting out demons, 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 Ah 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 Jai Cantesque. 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, behold 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 generalizations. I read a little history, and in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If anyone says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery, the answer is simple. It didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank, but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again, repainted and glittering with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did. It turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters. After being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged, and many such have never re-emerged, it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members, are simply the conditions under which they have been asked to work. But no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The nationalists are 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. Irish men 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 to the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous. He believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again, the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the Nambi-Pambi note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with medieval darkness and the political impractability 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 walk in the earth like a living judgment, and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead, this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith and justice that they get what they ask while others go empty away, so that the most hapless 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 civilization, 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 of the societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life. It could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse, for our civilization ought to have died by all parallels, by all sociological probability in the Ragnarok 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 Rivenants. 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 are lazy, but they are very industrious. Because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful. Because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in particularly bright colors and gay with gold. Because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't. It is moving toward the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train. But among these million facts all flowing one way, there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly but by itself. I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than material fate is, I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere emotion. It is strictly an intellectual conviction. But it is a primary intellectual conviction, like the certainty of self of the good of living. Anyone 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 medieval 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 medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles, they answer, but medievals 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've 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 detested? 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 they were 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 hear surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for scientific conditions in connection with alleged spiritual phenomenon. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with the 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 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.