I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining
and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at
Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I
suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an
inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial
gravity the man wrote down the word “Methuselahite.” Whoever looks over
such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his
time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist
knowledge he could not “place” Methuselahism among what Bossuet called
the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the
tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it
meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion “to live as long as
he could.”
Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that
answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of
quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious
problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some
new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the
whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as
or wise as that word “Methuselahite.” The whole meaning of literature
is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of
philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul
of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought,
like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the
paganism of to-day.
Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new
religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the
way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be
able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will
begin, “The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in
Nature....” “Methuselahite,” I shall say sharply; “good morning.”
“Human Life,” another will say, “Human Life, the only ultimate
sanctity, freed from creed and dogma....” “Methuselahite!” I shall
yell. “Out you go!” “My religion is the Religion of Joy,” a third will
explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), “the Religion
of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my....” “Methuselahite!” I shall cry
again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall
down. Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to
me (as one did only the other day): “Moods and impressions are the only
realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly
therefore define my religion....” “I can,” I should say, somewhat
sternly. “Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a
moment longer you won’t fulfil it.”
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old
vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it
masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls
it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends
idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can
almost certainly be prophesied—that in this saturnalia of sophistry
there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to
idealise cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of
mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice!
“Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?” the soldier would say as
he ran away. “Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of
consciousness?” the householder would say as he hid under the table.
“As long as there are roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain
here?” would come the voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would
be quite as easy to defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as
it has been, in many recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind
of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When
that last grand sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a
platform, you may depend upon it there will be a great stir in its
favour, that is, a great stir among the little people who live among
books and platforms. There will be a new great Religion, the Religion
of Methuselahism: with pomps and priests and altars. Its devout
crusaders will vow themselves in thousands with a great vow to live
long. But there is one comfort: they won’t.
For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which
is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of
courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be
killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that
a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little
the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is
one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was
the man’s religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he
enlisting as a soldier?