CHAPTER VI.--_The Paradoxes of Christianity_

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an

unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest

kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is

not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a

little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is

obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I

give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical

creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at

once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A

man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left.

Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a

leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find

on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin

eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At

last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one

side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just

then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny

element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the

universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called

round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like

an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a

globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it

comes to a point; but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this

element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but

it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth

it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It

would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should

have a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still organizing

expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat

country. Scientific men are also still organising expeditions to find a

man's heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the

wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses

these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician from the

moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two

shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that

the man's heart was in the right place, then I should call him something

more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have

since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces

logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has

found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about

things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things

go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the

unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn

about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will

not admit (though all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction

that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point

this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in

Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd

in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a

creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course, anything can be

believed in any age. But, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which

a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a

complex society than in a simple one. If a man finds Christianity true

in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had

found it true in Mercia. For the more complicated seems the coincidence,

the less it can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in the shape, say,

of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident. But if snowflakes

fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might

call it a miracle. It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since

come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our

modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of

the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill and

Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true. This is why

the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much

distresses those who admire Christianity without believing in it. When

once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as

scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it

is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say

that it's elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a

hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key

fits a lock, you know it is the right key.

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do

what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is

very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely

convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced.

He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the

thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a

philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only

really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more

converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more

bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an

ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer

civilisation to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after

object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that

bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ... and

policemen." The whole case for civilisation is that the case for it is

complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof

which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge

helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it

into action. And this hesitation chiefly arises, oddly enough, from an

indifference about where one should begin. All roads lead to Rome; which

is one reason why many people never get there. In the case of this

defence of the Christian conviction I confess that I would as soon begin

the argument with one thing as another; I would begin it with a turnip

or a taximeter cab. But if I am to be at all careful about making my

meaning clear, it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current

arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of

these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. All I had hitherto

heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at

the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I

cannot understand any one passing the age of seventeen without having

asked himself so simple a question. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy

reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the

Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though

perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over

some of His modern critics. I read the scientific and sceptical

literature of my time--all of it, at least, that I could find written in

English and lying about; and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing

else on any other note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also

read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but

I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of Christian

apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and

Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology.

They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers

were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers

unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The

rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and

when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for

the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down

the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought

broke across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." I

was in a desperate way.

This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than

their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read

and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the

faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew

gradually but graphically upon my mind--the impression that Christianity

must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had

Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical

talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It

was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner

had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than

another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to

the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and

aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn

its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come

across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at

random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four

or five of them; there are fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on

Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still

think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a

social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately

nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these

people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was

quite prepared to blow up St. Paul's Cathedral. But the extraordinary

thing is this. They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete

satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in

Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too

optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented

men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the

bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a

fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery. One

great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough, and why it was

hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian

optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands," hid from

us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free.

One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before

another began to call it a fool's paradise. This puzzled me; the charges

seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on

a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of

the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward

to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If

it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it

could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my

tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the

taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed--

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilæan, the world has grown gray

with Thy breath."

But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as in "Atalanta"),

I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the

Galilæan breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in

the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow,

Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced Christianity

for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something

wrong. And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps,

those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to

happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the

accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that

Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made

out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a

rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and

too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my

thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not

allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against

Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish,

and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its

attitude towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the

nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way,

Huxley in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem

tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian

counsels. The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that

priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation

that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read

it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have

gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the

next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I

found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but

for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars.

Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly

angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told

to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and

horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth

and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with

the meekness and non-resistance of the monastries were the very people

who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It

was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that

Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Lion did.

The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and

yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian

crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always

forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the

thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second

because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this

monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity

grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one

real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian

religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place,

full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably

be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in

Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed

with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the

doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--I mean the doctrine that

there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the

omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men;

but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and

most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common

sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be

writing "Thou shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest

hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when

deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this

doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral

sense, and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly

annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages

and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason.

But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who

said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very

people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was

right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I

was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles

and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly

pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,

then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had

always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was

their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one

people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that

it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were

the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the

dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief

compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness

about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering

some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one

religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to

consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics

of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the

ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two

hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was

bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good

enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing

thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing

so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on

every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in

detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three

accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain

sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack

on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation

of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then,

other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of

Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed

women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them

loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or,

again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the Marriage Service, were

said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman's intellect. But

I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's

intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent

that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with

its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the

next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its

ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused

for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had

always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh

the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often

accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious

extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have

found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one

another," and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion

that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same

conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for

despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I

did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only

concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such

hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be

very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also

spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic;

but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really

existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare,

austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy

of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly

optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something

quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no

explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically

speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of

mortals. _They_ gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.

Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was,

indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An

historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of

a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation

which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come

from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ,

He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still

thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.

Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were

puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short;

some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought

him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already

admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another

explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might

feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old

bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled

out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond

the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like

tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly

blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the

ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after

all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are

mad--in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there

was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the

accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For

instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged

Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But

then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined

extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The

modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But

then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before

ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man

found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he

found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.

The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on _entrées_.

The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And

surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in

the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity

at all, it was in the extravagant _entrées_, not in the bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far. The fact

that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and yet

more irritated at their happiness was easily explained. It was no longer

a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of

diseases in Swinburne. The restraints of Christians saddened him simply

because he was more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of

Christians angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man

should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked

Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian

about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human

about Malthusianism.

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was

merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in

it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in

their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to

think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not

merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints

might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the

saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this

point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr

and the suicide. In that matter there had been this combination between

two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity. This

was just such another contradiction; and this I had already found to be

true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which sceptics found the

creed wrong; and in this I had found it right. Madly as Christians might

love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more

madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity. Then

the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened,

and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts

of our theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the

optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise,

but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.

Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind

the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in

orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that

Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a

being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once

and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this

notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one

may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns

have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which

seeks to destroy the μεσον or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest

that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and

larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the

μεσον remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any

balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a

balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that

balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:

that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a

very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it

was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of

course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was

hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the

martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has

ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely

rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a

strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that

will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism

for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or

mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book.

This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly

or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if

he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by

continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by

enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire

for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely

cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He

must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will

not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to

it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No

philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with

adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity

has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the

suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the

sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held

up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of

chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the

Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key

to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the

still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of

modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The

average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was

content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were

many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would

see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air;

but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and

rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the

compromise between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of Matthew

Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;

neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.

This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;

you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this

mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it

clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility)

make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It

does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if

she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of

being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this

same strange expedient to save both of them.

It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way

Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he

was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I

am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am _a_ man I am the chief of

sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man

taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny--all that was to go. We

were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no

pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only

the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God

walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man

was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had

spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was

to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a

thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns

rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it

could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only

be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of

St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think

of _one's self_, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak

abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let

himself go--as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open

playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself

short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself

a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must

not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man,

_quâ_ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over

the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and

keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One

can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much

of one's soul.

Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some

highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a

paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly

means one of two things--pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving

unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of

pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall

probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say

that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn't: a

slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his

benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so

far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is

rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place

for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in

the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as

men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity

came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove

one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The

criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not

forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired

partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft

than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room

for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity,

the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the

chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they

require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social

and political liberty. The ordinary æsthetic anarchist who sets out to

feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents

him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry.

But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey."

He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being

outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is

simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.

For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little

difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out.

What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal

sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal

sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a

man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a

city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained

there), but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be

approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space

without breakage or wrong? _This_ was the achievement of this Christian

paradox of the parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war

between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their

optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like

cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist

than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the

world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both

were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he

liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple

banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The

pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the

sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with

all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with

compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept

seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed

them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only

to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic

Christianity rose into a high and strange _coup de théatre_ of

morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice.

The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive

forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the

first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St.

Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the

criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and

monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural

religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves; but we are too

proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison

reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent

philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse

before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly

against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr.

Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster

Abbey.

Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing

but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the

faith. It _is_ true that the historic Church has at once emphasised

celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so)

been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.

It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white,

like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had

a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which

is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of

black into white which is tantamount to a dirty grey. In fact, the whole

theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement

that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour. All that I

am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in

most of these cases to keep two colours co-existent but pure. It is not

a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a

shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the

anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It _is_ true that the

Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it _is_ true

that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight

were like statues. All this simply means that the Church preferred to

use its Supermen and to use its Tolstoyans. There must be _some_ good in

the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

There must be _some_ good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many

good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as

that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the

other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the

scruples of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club

instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they

poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the

vanity of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run

the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to run

it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James Douglas or the

banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes this pure gentleness and this

pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the

prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down

with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted.

It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that

when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But

that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That

is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the

lamb. The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still

retain his royal ferocity? _That_ is the problem the Church attempted;

_that_ is the miracle she achieved.

This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life.

This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not in the middle.

This is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly

where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It

not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those

underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might

discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being

merciful and also severe--_that_ was to anticipate a strange need of

human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it

were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite

miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one _may_ be quite

miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a

discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor

grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can

swagger and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new

balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because

proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and

romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet,

because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is

enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns

were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an

accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress.

So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt

under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the

combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the

people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at

least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the

black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.

But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's; the

balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.

Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be

flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank

water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards

of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more

perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as

Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon.

If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the

curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity)

has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example

of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis.

The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be

Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and

reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct

of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent, that

the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will

make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany

shall correct the insanity called France."

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so

inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I

mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes

of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch;

but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not

afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue

her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let

one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too

powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading,

but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring

doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion

and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically

for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a

Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,

or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need

but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The

smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and

the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests

of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak

afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were

made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A

sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken

all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all

the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter

eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order

that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be

careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a

foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and

safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.

It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was

the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop

this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of

statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days

went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to

say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.

She swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous

obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by

all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next

instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made

it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or

accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It

would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.

It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall

into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it

is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head;

the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a

modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those

open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and

sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom--that would

indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an

infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To

have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian

Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided

them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly

chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling

and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

CHAPTER VII.--_The Eternal Revolution_

The following propositions have been urged: First, that some faith in

our life is required even to improve it; second, that some

dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order to be

satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content and necessary

discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the

Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the gigantic levity of pleasure

nor the superb intolerance of pain. There is a vital objection to the

advice merely to grin and bear it. The objection is that if you merely

bear it, you do not grin. Greek heroes do not grin; but gargoyles

do--because they are Christian. And when a Christian is pleased, he is

(in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is

frightful. Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that

hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to

barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of

Jerusalem. He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry

out." Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the

facades of the mediæval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and

open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.

If these things be conceded, though only for argument, we may take up

where we left it the thread of the thought of the natural man, called by

the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity), "The Old Man." We can ask the

next question so obviously in front of us. Some satisfaction is needed

even to make things better. But what do we mean by making things better?

Most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that

circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere

rationalism. Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only

good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the

tortoise on the elephant.

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in

nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine

theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap

anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality

in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There

is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature.

Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read

aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to

read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals:

the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are

more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than

mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that

the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior

because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the

effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German

pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all.

He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or

he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the

cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of

spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think

that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It

all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that

there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine

about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores

unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat

gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature, and as we follow here

the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present)

the idea of getting it from God. We must have our own vision. But the

attempts of most moderns to express it are highly vague.

Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through

time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental

calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to

date. How can anything be up to date? a date has no character. How can

one say that Christmas celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth

of a month? What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is

behind his favourite minority--or in front of it. Other vague modern

people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief

mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what

is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame,

and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are

exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think

it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the

reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a

weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement,

worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross

metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some

are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he

was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of

strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before

himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even

Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a

question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said,

"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more

good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he

faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was

nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the

purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are

ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a

physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly

a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of

man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly

the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not

know either.

Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still.

Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody

knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting.

If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong.

Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing

anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.

Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that

they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution.

And these are the only sensible people. This is the only really healthy

way with the word evolution, to work for what you want, and to call

_that_ evolution. The only intelligible sense that progress or advance

can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish

to make the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so, the

essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere

method and preparation for something that we have to create. This is not

a world, but rather the materials for a world. God has given us not so

much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette. But He has

also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. We must be clear about

what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous

list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in

order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world

(real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.

We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:

personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form. It

implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to

make it something that we see already in our minds. Evolution is a

metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from

merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road. But reform is a

metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a

certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. And we

know what shape.

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We

have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should

mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress

does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should

mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men:

it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of

justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt

it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New

Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away

from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering

the ideal: it is easier.

Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a

particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to

complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a

long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense)

until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the

last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a

blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would

certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer

than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour

every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite

colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh

philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work

would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue

tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner. This is exactly

the position of the average modern thinker. It will be said that this is

avowedly a preposterous example. But it is literally the fact of recent

history. The great and grave changes in our political civilization all

belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They

belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in

Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently

in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in he hammered at

steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established

Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was

because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was

because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative. But in the

existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in Radicalism

to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh

Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is

over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably

it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realised (what is certainly the

case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of

complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish

institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is

unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The

net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism,

Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain

fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will

remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church

of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It

was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and

Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up

the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards

against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the

slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the

slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will

not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or

extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around

us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will

probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection

for liberty. But the man we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's

factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally

worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary

literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession

of wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next

day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day. The only

thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The only

man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be worth

his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical

literature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is

famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on

his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision

of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to

be realised, or even partly realised. The modern young man will never

change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which

progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many rapid

studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits.

But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a

new person sitting placidly for his portrait. So it does not matter

(comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal;

for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully

matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old

failures are fruitless. The question therefore becomes this: How can we

keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from

being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always

dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can

we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of

window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing

the sitter out of window?

A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for

rebelling. This fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of

revolution. Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will

only act swiftly upon old ideas. If I am merely to float or fade or

evolve, it may be towards something anarchic; but if I am to riot, it

must be for something respectable. This is the whole weakness of certain

schools of progress and moral evolution. They suggest that there has

been a slow movement towards morality, with an imperceptible ethical

change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great

disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow movement towards

justice; but it does not permit a swift movement. A man is not allowed

to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically

intolerable. To make the matter clear, it is better to take a specific

example. Certain of the idealistic vegetarians, such as Mr. Salt, say

that the time has now come for eating no meat; by implication they

assume that at one time it was right to eat meat, and they suggest (in

words that could be quoted) that some day it may be wrong to eat milk

and eggs. I do not discuss here the question of what is justice to

animals. I only say that whatever is justice ought, under given

conditions, to be prompt justice. If an animal is wronged, we ought to

be able to rush to his rescue. But how can we rush if we are, perhaps,

in advance of our time? How can we rush to catch a train which may not

arrive for a few centuries? How can I denounce a man for skinning cats,

if he is only now what I may possibly become in drinking a glass of

milk? A splendid and insane Russian sect ran about taking all the cattle

out of all the carts. How can I pluck up courage to take the horse out

of my hansom-cab, when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is

only a little fast or the cabman's a little slow? Suppose I say to a

sweater, "Slavery suited one stage of evolution." And suppose he

answers, "And sweating suits this stage of evolution." How can I answer

if there is no eternal test? If sweaters can be behind the current

morality, why should not philanthropists be in front of it? What on

earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense--the morality

that is always running away?

Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator

as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's

orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be

promptly executed. The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice

there is nothing evolutionary about it. The favourite evolutionary

argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where

do you draw the line?" the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it _here_:

exactly between your head and body." There must at any given moment be

an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be

something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all

intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things

as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China, or for

altering it every month as in the early French Revolution, it is equally

necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. This is our first

requirement.

When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence of

something else in the discussion: as a man hears a church bell above the

sound of the street. Something seemed to be saying, "My ideal at least

is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My

vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called

Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot

alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must

always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been

put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled

against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For

the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a

restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection

which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing

evolution can make the original good anything but good. Man may have had

concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of

him if they are sinful. Men may have been under oppression ever since

fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is

sinful. The chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the

harlot, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still

they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy

all your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact." I

paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity: but I passed on.

I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress. Some people

(as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic and impersonal

progress in the nature of things. But it is clear that no political

activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and

inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason

for being lazy. If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to

improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for

not being a progressive. But it is to none of these obvious comments

that I wish primarily to call attention.

The only arresting point is this: that if we suppose improvement to be

natural, it must be fairly simple. The world might conceivably be

working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular

arrangement of many qualities. To take our original simile: Nature by

herself may be growing more blue; that is, a process so simple that it

might be impersonal. But Nature cannot be making a careful picture made

of many picked colours, unless Nature is personal. If the end of the

world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and

inevitably as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece

of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design in it,

either human or divine. The world, through mere time, might grow black

like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned

into a particular piece of black and white art--then there is an artist.

If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance. We

constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern

humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as

meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of

humanity. They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more

and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or

sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have

been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. They say that we once

thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not here concerned

with their history, which is highly unhistorical. As a fact,

anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. It is

much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of affectation

than that primitive man ever ate it out of ignorance. I am here only

following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining

that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then

to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. I think it

wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.

Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is

the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can be said that it

is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress.

A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might, one feels,

be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce

fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because

it is stupid.

Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be

used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all

living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or

insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the

evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane;

but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason

for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as

the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a

shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution

tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his

stripes while avoiding his claws.

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden

of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the

supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all

pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this

proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard

Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main

point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is

our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same

father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to

imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a

strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn

mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother

to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of

Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and

even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as

well as loved.

This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted it

only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the

key would fit the smallest doors. Our main point is here, that if there

be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it must presumably

be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. One can imagine that some

automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer

noses. But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses?

I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses,

"Thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed": we

require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face. But we

cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing interesting

faces; because an interesting face is one particular arrangement of

eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation to each other.

Proportion cannot be a drift: it is either an accident or a design. So

with the ideal of human morality and its relation to the humanitarians

and the anti-humanitarians. It is conceivable that we are going more and

more to keep our hands off things: not to drive horses; not to pick

flowers. We may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by

argument; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing. The

ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite

still, not daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for

fear of incommoding a microbe. To so crude a consummation as that we

might perhaps unconsciously drift. But do we want so crude a

consummation? Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the

opposite or Nietzscheian line of development--superman crushing superman

in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed up for fun. But do

we want the universe smashed up for fun? Is it not quite clear that what

we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these

two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount

of energy and mastery. If our life is ever really as beautiful as a

fairy-tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a

fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops

short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of

him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of

the fairy-tale. The whole point depends upon his being at once humble

enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy. So our attitude to the

giant of the world must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing

contempt: it must be one particular proportion of the two--which is

exactly right. We must have in us enough reverence for all things

outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. We must also have

enough disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion,

spit at the stars. Yet these two things (if we are to be good or happy)

must be combined, not in any combination, but in one particular

combination. The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever

comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of

animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a

desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have

adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress. First,

it must be fixed; second, it must be composite. It must not (if it is to

satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing swallowing up

everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure; it must be a

definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and

relation. I am not concerned at this moment to deny that some such good

culmination may be, by the constitution of things, reserved for the

human race. I only point out that if this composite happiness is fixed

for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the

exact proportions of a composite happiness. If the beatification of the

world is a mere work of nature, then it must be as simple as the

freezing of the world, or the burning up of the world. But if the

beatification of the world is not a work of nature but a work of art,

then it involves an artist. And here again my contemplation was cloven

by the ancient voice which said, "I could have told you all this a long

time ago. If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of

progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and

dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other.

An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect

flatness or a peak of perfect height. But only a personal God can

possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with

just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you

can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour to the

many-coloured coat of Joseph."

Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact answer

that I required. I had said, "The ideal must be fixed," and the Church

had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything

else." I said secondly, "It must be artistically combined, like a

picture"; and the Church answered, "Mine is quite literally a picture,

for I know who painted it." Then I went on to the third thing, which, as

it seemed to me, was needed for an Utopia or goal of progress. And of

all the three it is infinitely the hardest to express. Perhaps it might

be put thus: that we need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from

Utopia as we fell from Eden.

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that

things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being

a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The

corruption in things is not only the best argument for being

progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative.

The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable

if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the

idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you

do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you

particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again;

that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want

the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is

true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense

true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really

required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which

human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and

journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact,

men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies

that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. Thus England

went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then

(almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the

tyranny of Charles the First. So, again, in France the monarchy became

intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had

been adored. The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the

guillotined. So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the

Radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the

people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a

tyrant eating the people like bread. So again, we have almost up to the

last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just

recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they

are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case,

the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any need to rebel against

antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the

capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. There is

no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it

is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its

back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely

that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact

that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the king is the most

private person of our time. It will not be necessary for any one to

fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not

need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.

This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is

the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to

allow. It must always be on the look out for every privilege being

abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. In this matter I am

entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be

always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their

trust in princes nor in any child of man. The chieftain chosen to be the

friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper

started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.

Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the

revolutionary. And then I caught my breath again: for I remembered that

I was once again on the side of the orthodox.

Christianity spoke again and said, "I have always maintained that men

were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature

to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go

wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous

human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through

centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If

you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of

original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I

call it what it is--the Fall.

I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I confess it

came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to think of it)

Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question

the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred. I have listened often

enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical

conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally

degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still

scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor

healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to

them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was

like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is

sitting on. If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would

strike democracy dead. If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may

or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite

practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot

give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall

give no vote. The governing class may not unreasonably say, "It may take

us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say, it

will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will

take your hint and not give him the chance." It fills me with horrible

amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist

industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating

blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. It is like

listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering

without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been

intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the

street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. At any

moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as

that, he need not come in at all. So it is when the ordinary Socialist,

with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing

experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may

say, "Very well, then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his

face. On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment,

the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and

clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at

any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better

conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should

not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On

the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The

comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best

opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to

the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide

for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one

answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can

offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For

she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's

environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to

talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all

is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture

has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large

needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious

to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his

smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest--if, in short,

we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they

could mean, His words must at the very least mean this--that rich men

are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when

watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere

minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the

whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the

rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are

trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear

everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies,

aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot

be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has

been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for

Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this

life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt,

financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the

Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have

said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.

It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of

definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the

rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian

to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite

certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more

morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, "I respect

that man's rank, although he takes bribes." But a Christian cannot say,

as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, "a man of that rank

would not take bribes." For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man

in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also

happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human

history. When people say that a man "in that position" would be

incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the

discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a

crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral

fall of _any_ man in _any_ position at _any_ moment; especially for my

fall from my position at this moment.

Much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out to the effect

that Christianity is akin to democracy, and most of it is scarcely

strong or clear enough to refute the fact that the two things have often

quarrelled. The real ground upon which Christianity and democracy are

one is very much deeper. The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian

idea is the idea of Carlyle--the idea that the man should rule who feels

that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen. If our

faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this--that the

man should rule who does _not_ think that he can rule. Carlyle's hero

may say, "I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say, "Nolo

episcopari." If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it

means this--that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in

dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who

feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got

to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown

the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.

Now, this is one of the two or three vital defences of working

democracy. The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at

present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. But even

the machinery of voting is profoundly Christian in this practical

sense--that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be

too modest to offer it. It is a mystical adventure; it is specially

trusting those who do not trust themselves. That enigma is strictly

peculiar to Christendom. There is nothing really humble about the

abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindoo is mild, but he is not meek.

But there is something psychologically Christian about the idea of

seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather than taking the obvious

course of accepting the opinion of the prominent. To say that voting is

particularly Christian may seem somewhat curious. To say that canvassing

is Christian may seem quite crazy. But canvassing is very Christian in

its primary idea. It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the

modest man, "Friend, go up higher." Or if there is some slight defect in

canvassing, that is in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only because

it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser.

Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a

very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of

natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and

obvious affair in the world.