The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading his religion

into Asia. Religion there is something different; it is both more and

less. He is like a man mapping out the sea as land; marking waves as

mountains; not understanding the nature of its peculiar permanence. It

is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and high

civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own

definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived

in terms of morality; as when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that

New England was Puritan. The map is not marked out in religions, in our

sense of churches. The state of mind is far more subtle, more relative,

more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake.

The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is

precisely because he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western

civilisation. The Moslem in the heart of Asia almost stands for the soul

of Europe. And as he stands between them and Europe in the matter of

space, so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of time.

In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the Nestorians in

Asia. Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the eastern

heresies. It owed something to the quite isolated and unique

individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the

theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the

Crusades. It owed nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the

atmosphere of the ancient and traditional world of Asia, with its

immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering philosophies. All

that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something

foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.

Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of Asiatic

religions, we should probably be reading into them something dogmatic

and ethical belonging to our own religion. It is as if a European

ignorant of the American atmosphere were to suppose that each ‘state’

was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or Poland; or that

when a Yankee referred fondly to his ‘home town’ he meant he had no

other nation, like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be

reading a particular sort of loyalty into America, so we are reading a

particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There are loyalties of other

kinds; but not what men on the West mean by being a believer, by trying

to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic.

In the intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied

by doubts and speculations. In the moral world it means something far

more loose and drifting. A professor of Persian at one of our great

universities, so passionate a partisan of the East as practically to

profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: ‘You will

never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive

religion as connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do

with ethics.’ We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher

Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some eastern esoteric

saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something

different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral

atmosphere of Asia and touches even that of Islam. It was very

realistically caught in the atmosphere of _Hassan_; and a very horrible

atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of the

genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of

metaphysics, far down in the abysses of mystical meditations, under all

that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and

a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does.

Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do

believe in a destiny, or because experience here is everything and

eternal life something totally different, but for some reason they are

totally different. I have read somewhere that there were three great

friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One became

the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was

the poet Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of

Mahomet; the third was the Old Man of the Mountain who maddened his

people with hashish that they might murder other people with daggers. It

does not really much matter what one does.

The Sultan in _Hassan_ would have understood all those three men; indeed

he was all those three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have

what we call a character; it is what we call a chaos. He cannot choose;

he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope. He is not in the same

sense creating something; for creation means rejection. He is not, in

our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of salvation

does really mean a labour like that of a man trying to make a statue

beautiful; a victory with wings. For that there must be a final choice;

for a man cannot make statues without rejecting stone. And there really

is this ultimate unmorality behind the metaphysics of Asia. And the

reason is that there has been nothing through all those unthinkable ages

to bring the human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time

has come to choose. The mind has lived too much in eternity. The soul

has been too immortal; in the special sense that it ignores the idea of

mortal sin. It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has

not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgment. It is not

crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had enough of the

cross. That is what we mean when we say that Asia is very old. But

strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in a sense any

place is as old as any other place. What we mean is that Europe has not

merely gone on growing older. It has been born again.

Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom. Asia, in its

vast territory, in its varied populations, in its heights of past

achievement and its depths of dark speculation, is itself a world; and

represents something of what we mean when we speak of the world. It is a

cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world as man has made it; and

contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made. Therefore

Asia stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival to

Christendom. But everywhere else where we get glimpses of that mortal

destiny, they suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia trails away

into the southern archipelagoes of the savages, or where a darkness full

of nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa, or where the last

survivors of lost races linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric

America, it is all the same story; sometimes perhaps later chapters of

the same story. It is men entangled in the forest of their own

mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics.

Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions. Monotheists

have grown weary of the most wonderful of truths. Diabolists here and

there have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have tried to

take refuge in hell. It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall

that was being felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman

decline. We also were going down that wide road; down that easy slope;

following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations of the

world.

If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable that

Europe would be now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed

for a real difference of race and environment, visible in the ancient as

in the modern world. But after all we talk about the changeless East

very largely because it has not suffered the great change. Paganism in

its last phase showed considerable signs of becoming equally changeless.

This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not

arise; as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It

does not mean that there would be no real mystics or visionaries; as

there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics in Asia. It does not

mean that there would be no social codes, as there were codes in

Antiquity and are codes in Asia. It does not mean that there could not

be good men or happy lives, for God has given all men a conscience and

conscience can give all men a kind of peace. But it does mean that the

tone and proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion

of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what they are in

the changeless East. And nobody who looks at that changeless East

honestly, and with a real sympathy, can believe that there is anything

there remotely resembling the challenge and revolution of the Faith.

In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things

might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we

call the religions of the East. There would still be Pythagoreans

teaching reincarnation, as there are still Hindus teaching

reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out of

reason and virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out

of reason and virtue. There would still be Neo-Platonists studying

transcendental truths, the meaning of which was mysterious to other

people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still

study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among

themselves. There would still be intelligent Apollonians apparently

worshipping the sun-god but explaining that they were worshipping the

divine principle; just as there are still intelligent Parsees apparently

worshipping the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity.

There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there

are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert. There would still be

crowds of people attending the popular feasts of the gods, in pagan

Europe as in pagan Asia. There would still be crowds of gods, local and

other, for them to worship. And there would still be a great many more

people who worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally

there would still be a very large number of people who did worship gods

and did believe in gods; and who believed in gods and worshipped gods

simply because they were demons. There would still be Levantines

secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly

sacrificing to Kalee. There would still be a great deal of magic; and a

great deal of it would be black magic. There would still be a

considerable admiration of Seneca and a considerable imitation of Nero;

just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist with the

tortures of China. And over all that tangled forest of traditions

growing wild or withering would brood the broad silence of a singular

and even nameless mood; but the nearest name of it is nothing. All these

things, good and bad, would have an indescribable air of being too old

to die.

None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of Christendom

would bear the least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean

Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it the Pythagorean

religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion. As the noble maxims of

Socrates would still be there, we might call it the Socratic religion as

we talk about the Confucian religion. As the popular holiday was still

marked by a mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the religion

of Adonis as we talk about the religion of Juggernaut. As literature

would still be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that

mythology a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion. We

might say that there were so many thousands or millions of people

belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting such temples or

merely living in a land full of such temples. But if we called the last

tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering legend of Adonis by the name of

a religion, then we must find some other name for the Church of Christ.

If anybody says that philosophic maxims preserved through many ages, or

mythological temples frequented by many people, are things of the same

class and category as the Church, it is enough to answer quite simply

that they are not. Nobody thinks they are the same when he sees them in

the old civilisation of Greece and Rome; nobody would think they were

the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years longer and

existed at the present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same

in the parallel pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present

day. None of these philosophies or mythologies are anything like a

Church; certainly nothing like a Church Militant. And, as I have shown

elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the exception

would prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history

does not produce a Church Militant; and the exception, or what some

would call the exception, is that Islam is at least militant if it is

not Church. And that is precisely because Islam is the one religious

rival that is _not_ pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense pagan.

Islam was a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even

if it was a bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and

therefore imitating the Church. It is no more surprising that

Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that Quakerism

had something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any

number of such emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.

The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to

effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus

to be delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state

of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their

moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much

more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine, even when he says

that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic

experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will

reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical

indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not

prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full of

demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in

the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what

happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an

emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an

anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already

the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect

or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for

the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the

point is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics; it would have

been true in the end of Europeans--if something had not happened. If the

Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been

marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all

men would have endured a slavery.

What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was hope.

Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both

were really sad; in the sense that they had not this hope even if they

had touches of faith or charity. We may call Buddhism a faith; though to

us it seems more like a doubt. We may call the Lord of Compassion a Lord

of Charity; though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity. But

those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree

that in all their ages they have not covered all their areas with that

sort of practical and pugnacious hope. In Christendom hope has never

been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed

upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has

at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did

very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome

rose again over the legions of Napoleon, or we have seen soaring but

yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. But in the Polish case even

revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a

reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated

even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the real

source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply

in the religion itself. Those who quarrel about it seldom even consider

it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full

consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation

that always recurs and still seems to require explanation.

There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising theology,

until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really

the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is

incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us

more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. The obvious

example is that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It is

absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty.

But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in

order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we might

reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has in that

fact a supernatural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or

give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a

miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be

a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man. But it is absurd to

forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more free

religion.

But it is true in twenty other matters. Anybody who believes at all in

God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that

supremacy does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal or

illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal power is the deity of

the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists.

Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it

into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with

his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law, that

reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent

and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles

and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince,

receiving petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases

of a whole people. I am not now arguing the rationality of this

conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it is not, as some

suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest and

most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of

those he wishes to save. But I am here only noting the general nature of

liberality, or of free or enlarged atmosphere of action. And in this

respect it is certain that the king can only be what we call magnanimous

if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the

feeling that his prayers do make a difference when offered for the

living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a free

citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth. It is

the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have the feeling

of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the

original use of the word _suffragium_, which we now use in politics for

a vote, was that employed in theology about a prayer. The dead in

Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this

sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may truly

say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of

the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.

But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that tragedy

which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the

extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will

give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a

trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common

soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much less

human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces

humanity; the point of the story which was quite literally the point of

a spear. It does not especially humanise the universe to say that good

and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would be any

sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may

easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more

than that Queen Anne is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to

be men, in the full sense of being heroes. But if we are describing, for

the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and popular and even

picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no

sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike

the same note as the notion of the master suffering instead of his

servants. And this is given by the theological and emphatically not by

the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry

pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that

celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the

front of battle.

What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but

rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma

is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it

permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it

permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say;

and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something

to be said for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal

prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is

not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean

quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least

that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very

literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so

free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in

fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing

in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like

accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to

believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This

is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always

show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of

all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the

freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of

eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a

necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer

thought and a more liberal theology.

The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation. In

other words, it is a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a

vision of reality. The faith consists in a conviction of its reality.

That, for example, is the difference between a vision and a day-dream.

And that is the difference between religion and mythology. That is the

difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human and more

or less healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There

is something in the reasonable use of the very word vision that implies

two things about it; first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it

comes only once; and secondly that it probably comes once and for all. A

day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be different every day. It

is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories and

meeting a ghost.

But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is not a

philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture.

It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an

abstract explanation; as that everything is recurrent; or everything is

relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive. It is

not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort seen in a

picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a

process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a

story is convincing. In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes,

like life. For indeed it is life. An example of what is meant here might

well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy

enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the

pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less

accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is

easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian

Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges

as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all, perhaps, to

say as the dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two

are equal; and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a

black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in

his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none

of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that

the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the

sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he

has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great

Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Every existence, as such, is

good.’ On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly

and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot.

He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid

than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them

out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but

an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet

more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or

that everything is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong.

But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a

right to be there; and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no

right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a

usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him

vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and

the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos

that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions

and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic

composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise

in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that

abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night.

But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is

like life.

Another example might be found, not in the problem of evil, but in what

is called the problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the

age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or

remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all

possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not

pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that

Mr. Smith of Golder’s Green got better or worse or remained exactly the

same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him

that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It

had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to

go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or

downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going

where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or

falling drunk in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure

story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.

The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation

both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of

a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in

that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that

is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is

something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal

narrative instinct which produced all the fairy-tales is something that

is neglected by all the philosophies--except one. The Faith is the

justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for

it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an

adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man

in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both

there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in

other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at

it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and

democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the

other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where

they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends

differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From

Buddha and his wheel to Akhen-Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with

his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine,

there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul

of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion

of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each

of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does

something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by

fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of

adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of

drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into

atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral

consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests

monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests

insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a

thing as the divine story which is also a human story. But there is no

such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story

or a determinist story. For every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a

cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and

not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end

with a last judgment.

And _that_ is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war

until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates

out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave

himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in a superior

fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols

and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in

triumph and trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to

divide itself from Brahminism, and why in every age and country outside

Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the philosopher and

the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally

the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is

always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the

philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories. It came into

the world with the story of Christ.

And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above.

Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily

see the point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to

somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur

to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises, particular

dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a

sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body

of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we

could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would get back the

body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go round and

round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a

proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not

work out the precise legend of Eurydice without having heard of

Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the story would end

and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess

the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated,

from the dead.

To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man

offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring

tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most

certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for

romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being

a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical

character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical

character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the

ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other

ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he

could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun.

The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that,

if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any

other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world.

Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched at

all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one

lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable

calculations. The picture-makers would have remained for ever painting

the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up

numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss that nothing but an

incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he

stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even

than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.

But even with that we return to the more specially Christian symbol in

the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a

historical and not a theological outline, and it is not my duty here to

defend in detail that theology, but merely to point out that it could

not even be justified in design without being justified in detail--like

a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no

apologetic about why the creed should be accepted. But in answer to the

historical query of why it was accepted, and is accepted, I answer for

millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock; because it is

like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true

story. It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the

truth. We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road

is open before us. It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a

consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only

incredible heavens, but what seems to some an equally incredible earth,

and makes it credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain

because it is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses.

We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but

because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of

liberty blow over the land of the living.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH

It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of

Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which

involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It

is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid

heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a

supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the

more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a

certain rather peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down

to the present moment, with a note on which this book may well conclude.

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old

to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had

a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who

knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which

marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over

and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the

same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always

converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This

truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed.

Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore

it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us

that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious

organisation can be a hollow sham; but they hardly realise how true it

is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of

Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and

almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked

in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such

critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the

official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an

eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the

official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the

official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference

between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun

its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not

worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever

in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it

had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not

the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of

Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of

examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been

said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that

particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out.

All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a

respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified

into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the

last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again

suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising

from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even

about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for

instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an

old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some

of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority

on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that

they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour)

‘by rather slack Christians.’

Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the

scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several

occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from

within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell

stood as the Pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that

in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the

fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the

transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is

obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the

many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other

examples which would be worthy of separate studies.

The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed

somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might

have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or

tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side

by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this

western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing.

Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and

reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by

rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner;

by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the

capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and

as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic

renaissance every century or two, with the young Druids crowned with

fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has

not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round

Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids

is safe from the vandalism of restoration.

But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old

to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed.

The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get

killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And

there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which

I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow

of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there

passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at

the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It

withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels

were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered and

shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as

it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer

to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing

happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly

postponed.

What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of the twelfth

century; when, as it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his

sleep? Why did there appear so strangely early, in the twilight of dawn

after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism as that involved in urging

nominalism against realism? For realism against nominalism was really

realism against rationalism, or something more destructive than what we

call rationalism. The answer is that just as some might have thought the

Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have

thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as

the Empire had ended; and the Church should have departed with them, if

she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of those

spectral deaths or simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had

succeeded, it would have been as if Arianism had succeeded; it would

have been the beginning of a confession that Christianity had failed.

For nominalism is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism.

Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages broadened

into that daylight that we call the modern world. But what was the

answer? The answer was Aquinas in the chair of Aristotle, taking all

knowledge for his province; and tens of thousands of lads, down to the

lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and on crusts about the

great colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.

What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran round the West

under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous

images of Saracen knights swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were

men in the extreme West, such as King John if I remember rightly,

accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being secretly

atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities

about the rationalistic Arab version or Aristotle? Authorities are

seldom alarmed like that except when it is too late. The answer is that

hundreds of people probably believed in their hearts that Islam would

conquer Christendom; that Averroes was more rational than Anselm; that

the Saracen culture was really, as it was superficially, a superior

culture. Here again we should probably find a whole generation, the

older generation, very doubtful and depressed and weary. The coming of

Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years

before its time. To many it may have seemed quite reasonable and quite

probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would have been

surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder

from thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into

one exultant counter-charge; the Crusades. It was the sons of St.

Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of

the world; it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was

the waking of the world. In considering the war of the Albigensians, we

come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide of a new

philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the new

philosophy was also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none

the less like modern ideas because it was as old as Asia; most modern

ideas are. It was the Gnostics returning; but why did the Gnostics

return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the Empire;

and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer hovering

over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that

men might have death and that they might have it more abundantly.

It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, simply because

the period is so much nearer to us and people know so much more about

it. But there is more even in that example than most people know. Apart

from the particular controversies which I wish to reserve for a separate

study, the period was far more chaotic than those controversies commonly

imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism, and

Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, it is often

forgotten that many perished in such persecutions who could only be

described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism or even diabolism. That

world was almost as wild as our own; the men wandering about in it

included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of man who

says he is himself God, the sort of man who says something that nobody

can make head or tail of. If we could have the _conversation_ of the

age following the Renaissance, we should probably be shocked by its

shameless negations. The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably

pretty typical of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The transition

from Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of

very yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the

same. It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on the water,

so was Christianity walking in the air.

But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved in

detail. We can see the fact much more clearly in the case when the

paganism of the Renaissance ended Christianity and Christianity

unaccountably began all over again. But we can see it most clearly of

all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and minute

evidence; the case of the great decline of religion that began about the

time of Voltaire. For indeed it is our own case; and we ourselves have

seen the decline of that decline. The two hundred years since Voltaire

do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth and fifth centuries or

the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can see this

oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can

lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion;

we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish

bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did

look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened

again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among

the old. When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he

certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with

the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to

all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the

dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the

reversal, we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.

A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the

parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest

fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a

surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning

backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains. To

have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is

to know that nearly everybody had come to take it for granted that

religion was a thing that would continually broaden like a river, till

it reached an infinite sea. Some of them expected it to go down in a

cataract of catastrophe, most of them expected it to widen into an

estuary of equality and moderation; but all of them thought its

returning on itself a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft. In other

words, most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be

slowly broadened down; and some advanced people thought that it would be

very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of

Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was

perhaps more certain than any men before or since about the direction in

which the world is going. People were so certain about the direction

that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated with alarm, and

a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the

Archbishop of Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons

on the lamp-posts. But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the

Archbishop instead of losing his head should be looking for his mitre;

and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons we should

strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their

very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsyturvydom

topsy-turvy.

In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was

going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast

that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is

something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential

reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can

go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all

the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim

backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy

arrogance of a fairy ship; but if the fairy ship sails upstream it is

really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with

the tide of apparent progress and enlargement, there was many a

demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as

the movement of a dead dog’s limbs wavering in the eddying water; and

many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is

not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and

even life-giving things that went with that stream did not thereby prove

that they were living or life-giving. It was this other force that was

unquestionably and unaccountably alive; the mysterious and unmeasured

energy that was thrusting back the river. That was felt to be like the

movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a

living monster because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It

was none the less an unnatural, an incongruous, and to some a comic

upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent had suddenly risen out of the

Round Pond--unless we consider the Sea Serpent as more likely to live in

the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed,

for it was one of the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of

the reversal. That age did really feel that a preposterous quality in

prehistoric animals belonged also to historic rituals; that mitres and

tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and

that appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive

Man.

The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all because it

still moves. I have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort

of reproaches that are still directed against it and its much greater

consequences; it is enough to say here that the more such critics

reproach it the less they explain it. In a sense it is my concern here,

if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of the

explanation; but above all, it is my concern to point out one particular

thing about it. And that is that it had all happened before; and even

many times before.

To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an

attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what

the most remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has

only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended. It is

already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end

in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return

of those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as

the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts at a compromise with

Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point to seize in

the modern case, as in all the other cases, is that what returns is not

in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a

purified theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for

theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the

divine science. An old Don with D.D. after his name may have become the

typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with

his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely

because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than

in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of

Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead

tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was

precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian

faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could,

the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.

There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit.

They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But

it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of

apparent death is not the lingering of the shade; it is the resurrection

of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and

reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are

not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of

morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time

quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would

fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly

appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning

in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more

unmistakable, that the seven-branched candle-stick suddenly towered to

heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But

other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the

candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have

grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has

followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson

cataract, the strength of the red original wine. And we only say once

more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: ‘Long years and

centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they

dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since

the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the

age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second

fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of

Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed

out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world.

Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and

the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple

vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year

we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown

more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the

water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element

fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to

dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But

Thou hast kept the good wine until now.’

This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The

faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has

not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the

sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it

has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from

the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution.

But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has

survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but

degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness

and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about

the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But

this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had

been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and

then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the

sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent

weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but

if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely

immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was

but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange

to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that

it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now

as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All

these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there

seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it

began again.

‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’

The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more

dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not

imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation

of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In

the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that

no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven

into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn

asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the

popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power

in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and

the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so

complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its

turn: and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They

went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty

years were using all its light and learning for new religious

foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been

withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was

supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of

Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History

disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future.

To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it

grows.

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men

really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a

story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn

from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for

anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but

it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as

they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words

shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch

for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even

unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil the

relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch

for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished;

and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet

or the freezing of the star.

CONCLUSION

THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK

I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase

about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a

special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich

and many-sided encyclopedia of history, for which that name was chosen.

And yet there is a certain reason in the reference; and a sense in which

the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of

the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an

outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as

an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is

splendid as a storehouse or treasury of history; it is a fascinating

disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of

history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing

that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of

outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the

difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill

and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things

that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I

think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as

compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared

with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is

extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands

out as an exception.

I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I have no

reason to do so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in

very much the same way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to

the reader the main point I meant about the proportions of history, and

why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others. I doubt

whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the

introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of

summary in a concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on which I

have insisted are more essential to an outline of history than the

things which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not believe that the

past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades

away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or

religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into

the religions of the world. In short I do not believe that the best way

to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines. I believe

that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale very

simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or

a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up

all that has gone before in what seems to me a realistic and reasonably

proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.

In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad

daylight, there are many and very various things, motionless and moving.

There moves among them a race that is in its relation to the others a

race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can

behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual

illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid

and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that

have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world,

are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of

the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the

beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary

distinction. It is like saying that a magician must after all have the

appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without

feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these

mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact

altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other

creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish

does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the

elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man

is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The

very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him

from all.

Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame

that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world

makes that world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style

or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions.

He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands;

but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design

already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now

vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of

blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for

every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common

field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth;

there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This

impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly

influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that

the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world.

They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as

the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower.

But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious

that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another

thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was some one else, some

strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they

were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious

benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for

their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a

servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to

the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of

men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than

any such argument about the external plan of the world. But I am

concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even

concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including

the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a

final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some

sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the

treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating

that idea; which between them make up most of the religious history of

the world.

The majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second

meaning in things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world.

But the majority, the mob or mass of men, naturally tended to treat it

rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a

great deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales

about the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of

the tales may truly be called old wives’ tales; as professing only to be

very remote memories of the morning of the world; myths about the baby

moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them might more truly be

called travellers’ tales; as being curious but contemporary tales

brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as miraculous

cures or those that bring whispers of what has happened to the dead.

Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are probably true

to keep a person of real common sense more or less conscious that there

really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in

a sense it is only going by appearances; even if the appearances are

called apparitions. It is a matter of appearances--and disappearances.

At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most

of us they are rather gossip about glimpses. And for the rest, the whole

world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly romances.

The great majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible

king are told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of

the topic. They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they

are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be. They

are mythology, or the poetry that is not bound in books--or bound in any

other way.

Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and

had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of

the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were

trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting

their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world;

considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate

purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than

mankind has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a

few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of the more morbid

fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more

degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most

of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in

nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of

them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and

reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; and their scriptures

became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their

tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they

received divine honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains

in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word, wherever

the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip, could come

into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the

myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it

did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were

men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes.

Divine Plato, like Divus Caesar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia,

where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look

more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain

special class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour

from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who

have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent

chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours

and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences about

the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to

project the primary purpose of that mind _a priori_. They have tried to

put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were

not yet made.

Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception.

It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of

doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too

good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this

mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It

declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of

historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible

being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand

down myths; the Man Who Made the World. That such a higher personality

exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best

thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of

this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to

say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious

master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of

them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects

or schools had ever claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the

sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the

true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said

was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being;

or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any

primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at

the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little

subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with

tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of

the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by

the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand

years--that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is

the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his

first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique

character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It

would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but

it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.

It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers

proclaiming that apocalyptic portent; and it is not unduly fanciful to

say they are running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise

philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of

the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were

messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be,

or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is

not a theory or a fancy but a fact. It is not relevant to this

intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that it is a fact;

but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men

deal with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition,

authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but

the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact.

I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial

complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange

story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak, the

strangest story in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines

and specially to mark where the great line is really to be drawn. The

religion of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided into

fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It

is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message and

the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.

But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more

concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by

names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For

instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems, we really

mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean, by that,

that it contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of

men--that the invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with

the customs of a certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain

law-giver; but so they would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon.

They testify to something which is a necessary and noble truth; but was

never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral

and normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man.

Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own

particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of the ancient

starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many Confucians

or Buddhists, we mean that it contains so many Pagans whose prophets

have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible

power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say

that they also have temples and idols and priests and periodical

festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human

being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and

fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But

what the gods are supposed to _be_, what the priests are commissioned to

_say_, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of

the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any

Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody

else has any news.

Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still

speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed

and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild

eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the

message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of

something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world

like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is

still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer

in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly

on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to

grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We

might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows

old.

For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so

supernatural should have become so natural. I mean that anything so

unique when seen from the outside should only seem universal when seen

from the inside. I have not minimised the scale of the miracle, as some

of our milder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I

deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke

the very backbone of history. I have great sympathy with the

monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom it seems a blasphemy; a

blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it

steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more

solid and more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the

unbelievers to insist upon the audacity of the act of faith that is

demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a

suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to

reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer

does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see

their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of ethics

and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism

and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their

canons in contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of

things beyond good and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two

and two make five. Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so

outrageous in outline remains solid and sane in substance. It remains

the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists

exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have

deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic

character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained

defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural. I have

admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says

he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the man

who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world.

He does not remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure,

in whose light everything is as clear as crystal.

But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane when

everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age

after age, men are continually coming back as to a home. That is the

riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still

be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic

says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could

stand so long without foundation. Still less can I see how it could

become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely appeared and

disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or explained as the

last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the ultimate

mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not

break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the

world. If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have

lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an

ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two

thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more

levelheaded, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its

instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death,

than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came

forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense.

Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and by

His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness

is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys

happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they

tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and

intolerant enlightenment; the lightning made eternal as the light.

APPENDIX I

ON PREHISTORIC MAN

In a sense it would be better if history were more superficial. What is

wanted is a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they

are forgotten almost as quickly. The one moral of this book, in a manner

of speaking, is that first thoughts are best. So a flash might reveal a

landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it as

they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the

book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense,

alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has

also certain practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add

these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of

ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric

pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn

from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anybody

could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am

conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may

exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific

research, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than

I had occasion to say in that passage of the stages into which primitive

humanity has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is

elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages before the

Cro-Magnan or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed

recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to

repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion, noted in these

pages, of something necessarily slow or late in the development of

religion will gain little indeed from these later revelations about the

precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold

that, whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people

that lived before it were religious already. Men were already burying

their dead with the care that is the significant sign of mystery and

hope. This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument

that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man’s skull. It

is little use to compare the head of the man with the head of the

monkey, if it certainly has never come into the head of the monkey to

bury another monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a

heavenly monkey-house. Talking of skulls, we all know the story of the

finding of a Cro-Magnan skull that is much larger and finer than a

modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist,

awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything

being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to

prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming

to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled

head.

APPENDIX II

ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY

In this book, which is merely meant as a popular criticism of popular

fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have

sometimes given an impression of scoffing at serious scientific work. It

was, however, the very reverse of my intention. I am not arguing with

the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who

explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the

gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant,

especially when he appeals to the learned. But I never meant my own

criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned. We all owe an

infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent researches, of

single-minded students in these matters; and I have only professed to

pick up things here and there from them. I have not loaded my abstract

argument with quotations and references, which only make a man look more

learned than he is; but in some cases I find that my own loose fashion

of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The passage about

Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the

English poet probably had in mind the English saint; of whose story he

gives a sort of foreign version. In the same way two statements in the

chapter on Mythology follow each other in such a way that it may seem to

be suggested that the second story about Monotheism refers to the

Southern Seas. I may explain that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian

but to American savages. So in the chapter called ‘The Antiquity of

Civilisation,’ which I feel to be the most unsatisfactory, I have given

my own impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian monarchy

too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the facts on which it

was founded, as given in works like those of Professor J. L. Myres. But

the confusion was not intentional; still less was there any intention to

imply, in the remainder of the chapter, that the anthropological

speculations about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are. My

criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the Pyramids are plainer

than the tracks of the desert, without denying that wiser men than I may

see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.

Transcriber's Note:

Two possible typos do match the printed editions:

"A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows."

- "omniscience" seems awkward, but does make sense.

"But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline."

- It is unclear what "demd" should be.