It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern

"force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most

fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest

things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless,

because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards,

because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards,

because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of

frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern

investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a

characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." They

might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of

levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This

has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct

of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels,

not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most

earnest mediæval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of

quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern

Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites.

Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In

the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or

gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in

the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the

rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the

proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards,

for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward

drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a

sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay

self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a

blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much

more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a

natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the

easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good _Times_ leading

article than a good joke in _Punch_. For solemnity flows out of men

naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be

light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe since it has been Christian

that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart

treated aristocracy as a weakness--generally as a weakness that must be

allowed for. If any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him go

outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere. Let him,

for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes of India.

There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far more

intellectual. It is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a scale

of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the butcher in an

invisible and sacred sense. But no Christianity, not even the most

ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet was better than a

butcher in that sacred sense. No Christianity, however ignorant or

extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would not be damned. In pagan

society there may have been (I do not know) some such serious division

between the free man and the slave. But in Christian society we have

always thought the gentleman a sort of joke, though I admit that in some

great crusades and councils he earned the right to be called a practical

joke. But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took

aristocracy seriously. It is only an occasional non-European alien (such

as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite) who can even

manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously. It may be a mere

patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the

English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of

all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as

all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious

matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great

and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could

possibly take it seriously.

In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for an equal law

in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity had been there

before me. The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness.

I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new

turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a

thousand years old. For me, in the ancient and partly in the modern

sense, God answered the prayer, "Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings."

Without vanity, I really think there was a moment when I could have

invented the marriage vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I

discovered, with a sigh, that it had been invented already. But, since

it would be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by

inch, my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New

Jerusalem, I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as

indicating the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all

the rest.

When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about impossibilities and

alterations in human nature they always miss an important distinction.

In modern ideal conceptions of society there are some desires that are

possibly not attainable: but there are some desires that are not

desirable. That all men should live in equally beautiful houses is a

dream that may or may not be attained. But that all men should live in

the same beautiful house is not a dream at all; it is a nightmare. That

a man should love all old women is an ideal that may not be attainable.

But that a man should regard all old women exactly as he regards his

mother is not only an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not

to be attained. I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these

examples; but I will add the example which has always affected me most.

I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me

the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself.

Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any

discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any

fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if

a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only

ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the

stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure

and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils,

rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be _real_, or

the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I

must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I

must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to

be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in

vowing. You could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a

man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top

of the Eiffel Tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to

behave like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the wildest romance,

results must be real; results must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is

the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it

is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing. And this

is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask

imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my

bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask

Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.

All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for

their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I

seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "You

will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get

to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is

to get there."

CHAPTER VIII.--_The Romance of Orthodoxy_

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our

epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness

and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the

apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy

with taxicabs and motor-cars; but this is not due to human activity but

to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity,

if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if

it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical

bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the

machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves

mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used

like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet

the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long

railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or

too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to

try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one

syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence

is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological

evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you

can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey

matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol

and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a

thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not

the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more

metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word

"degeneration."

But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of

reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially

ruinous and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word is

used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to

take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a

piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. In

the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to

complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with

"materialist" as a moral taunt. So, to take a cheaper instance, the man

who hates "progressives" in London always calls himself a "progressive"

in South Africa.

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the

word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and

society. It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be

freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free. You

might just as well say that all idealists ought to be High Churchmen,

because they ought to love everything that is high. You might as well

say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass, or that Broad Churchmen

ought to like broad jokes. The thing is a mere accident of words. In

actual modern Europe a free-thinker does not mean a man who thinks for

himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one

particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the

impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and

so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed

almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of

this chapter to show.

In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly as

possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted

on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would

be definitely illiberal. Almost every contemporary proposal to bring

freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the

world. For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all

directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called

scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of

necessity. And every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can

be shown to be the natural ally of oppression. In fact, it is a

remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to

think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is

only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance

with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist

orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a

German philosophy to justify him entirely.

Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new

theology or the modernist church. We concluded the last chapter with the

discovery of one of them. The very doctrine which is called the most

old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies

of the earth. The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the

only strength of the people. In short, we found that the only logical

negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin. So it is,

I maintain, in all the other cases.

I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some

extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to

disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine,

nor can anybody tell me. For some inconceivable cause a "broad" or

"liberal" clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish

the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that

number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came

out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his

own aunt came out of her grave. It is common to find trouble in a parish

because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water;

yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says

that his father walked on the Serpentine? And this is not because (as

the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot

be believed in our experience. It is not because "miracles do not

happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith.

More supernatural things are _alleged_ to have happened in our time than

would have been possible eighty years ago. Men of science believe in

such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even

horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in

modern psychology. Things that the old science at least would frankly

have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science.

The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is

the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny

miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is

a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was

not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.

The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection

because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved

in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe

it. Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the

instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was

faith in their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a

profound and even a horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was

a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the

incurable routine of the cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only

the dogmas of the monist.

Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards.

Here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the

liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the

discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles.

Reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the

gradual control of matter by mind. A miracle simply means the swift

control of matter by mind. If you wish to feed the people, you may think

that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible--but you

cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the

seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on

flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely. A holiday, like

Liberalism, only means the liberty of man. A miracle only means the

liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you

cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea. The Catholic

Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom.

Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific

materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the

Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe.

And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."

This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case. The assumption

that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality or

reform is literally the opposite of the truth. If a man cannot believe

in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly

liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much

better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the

more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the

soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance.

Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the

ablest men. For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with a hearty

old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort

of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely

unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own

favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the

same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness,

forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and

heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life

infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is

desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom,

then miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards

whether they are possible.

But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion

that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps the liberation of

the world. The second example of it can be found in the question of

pantheism--or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called

immanentism, and which often is Buddhism. But this is so much more

difficult a matter that I must approach it with rather more preparation.

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded

audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually

our truisms that are untrue. Here is a case. There is a phrase of facile

liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments

of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but

they are the same in what they teach." It is false; it is the opposite

of the fact. The religions of the earth do _not_ greatly differ in rites

and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man

were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the _Church Times_ and

the _Freethinker_ look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum

and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other

hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing."

The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the

fact that they don't say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in

Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon.

You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal

and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or

anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their

souls that they are divided. So the truth is that the difficulty of all

the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they

agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite.

They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works

with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn

brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what

they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern

pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would

both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have

scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have

guns.

The great example of this alleged identity of all human religions is the

alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Those who adopt

this theory generally avoid the ethics of most other creeds, except,

indeed, Confucianism, which they like because it is not a creed. But

they are cautious in their praises of Mahommedanism, generally confining

themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the

lower classes. They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view of marriage (for

which there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish

worshippers their attitude may even be called cold. But in the case of

the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.

Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always insisting

that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially

Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I

read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds:

resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all

humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all. The

author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in

which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some

point in which they are quite obviously different. Thus, as a case of

the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the

divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine

voice to come out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely urged

that these two Eastern teachers, by a singular coincidence, both had to

do with the washing of feet. You might as well say that it was a

remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash. And the other

class of similarities were those which simply were not similar. Thus

this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention to the fact

that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama is rent in pieces

out of respect, and the remnants highly valued. But this is the reverse

of a resemblance, for the garments of Christ were not rent in pieces

out of respect, but out of derision; and the remnants were not highly

valued except for what they would fetch in the rag shops. It is rather

like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of

the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head.

It is not at all similar for the man. These scraps of puerile pedantry

would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged

philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving

too much or not proving anything. That Buddhism approves of mercy or of

self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like Christianity; it

is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence.

Buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all sane

human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess. But to say that

Buddhism and Christianity give the same philosophy of these things is

simply false. All humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. Most

of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way

out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe

which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.

Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly,

people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing

about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in

their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of

representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to

represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint

in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The

opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of

it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the

Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a

sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep.

The mediæval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are

frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between

forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both

images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be

a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The

Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is

staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue

steadily we shall find some interesting things.

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that

there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only

versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say

what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply

the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one

person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and

man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours;

she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and

suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find

themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life

with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not

because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the

world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but

as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are

separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously

impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly

fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous

courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really

unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is

only one enormously selfish person.

It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and

immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of

humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore love

desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God

has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living

pieces. It is her instinct to say "little children love one another"

rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the

intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the

Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the

Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.

The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order

that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of

Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love

it. The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or

hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like

some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so

that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. We come back to

the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern

philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a

sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God

actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.

But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and

man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is

necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to

love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an

immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively

from that earthquake saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son

of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings

entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement

that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as

true of democratic fraternity as of divine love; sham love ends in

compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in

bloodshed. Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the

obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord. According to Himself the

Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an

æon hate each other. But the Father also was a sword, which in the

black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love

each other at last.

This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the

mediæval saint in the picture. This is the meaning of the sealed eyes of

the superb Buddhist image. The Christian saint is happy because he has

verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is

staring at them in astonishment. But why should the Buddhist saint be

astonished at things? since there is really only one thing, and that

being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself. There have been

many pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones.

The pantheist cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything

as really distinct from himself. Our immediate business here however is

with the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards,

towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general need for

ethical activity and social reform. And surely its effect is

sufficiently obvious. There is no real possibility of getting out of

pantheism any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in

its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies

in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another.

Swinburne in the high summer of his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle

with this difficulty. In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the

inspiration of Garibaldi and the revolt of Italy, he proclaimed the

newer religion and the purer God which should wither up all the priests

of the world.

"What doest thou now

Looking Godward to cry

I am I, thou art thou,

I am low, thou art high,

I am thou that thou seekest to find him, find thou

but thyself, thou art I."

Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants are as much

the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba of Naples having,

with the utmost success, "found himself" is identical with the ultimate

good in all things. The truth is that the western energy that dethrones

tyrants has been directly due to the western theology that says "I am I,

thou art thou." The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a

good king in the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples. The

worshippers of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba. The worshippers of

Swinburne's god have covered Asia for centuries and have never

dethroned a tyrant. The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes

because he is looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and

It. It is a rational occupation: but it is not true in theory and not

true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon.

That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity

(the command that we should _watch_ and pray) has expressed itself both

in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics: but both

depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves,

a deity that disappears. Certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest

that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth

of our own ego. But only we of Christendom have said that we should hunt

God like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in

the chase.

Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value democracy and

the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much more likely to find

them in the old theology than the new. If we want reform, we must adhere

to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the

counsels of Mr. R.J. Campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent

or the transcendent deity. By insisting specially on the immanence of

God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social

indifference--Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God

we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous

indignation--Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is

always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has

transcended himself.

If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned we

shall find the case the same. It is the same, for instance, in the deep

matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without

a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high

intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so

many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the

least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism

for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an

enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to gather the

mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet.

The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern

king. The _heart_ of humanity, especially of European humanity, is

certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that

gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy

pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and

variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western

religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not well for man to be

alone." The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the

Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of

monks. So even asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were

sociable even when they were silent. If this love of a living complexity

be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion

than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with

reverence)--to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless

mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with

it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say

here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an

English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly

quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and the

dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real

Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it

is not well for God to be alone.

Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger of the

soul, which has unsettled so many just minds. To hope for all souls is

imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable.

It is tenable, but it is not specially favourable to activity or

progress. Our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on

the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a

thread or clinging to a precipice. To say that all will be well anyhow

is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a

trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasise possible perdition; and Europe

always has emphasised it. Here its highest religion is at one with all

its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence

is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a

Christian existence is a _story_, which may end up in any way. In a

thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by

cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he

_might_ be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable

hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he

would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In

Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it

is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast

and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about

ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is

concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? that is

the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The æons are easy

enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is

really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the

instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in

theology dealt much with hell. It is full of _danger_ like a boy's book:

it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity

between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you

say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the

dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic

churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a

magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our

next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and

leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting

moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong

an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish

a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When

somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one

Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed

Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt

inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly

because it has insisted on the theological free-will. It is a large

matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately

here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk

about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic

environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.

The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active

choice, whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a

profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,

"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be

Profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must

not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must

get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly

expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient"

is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be

saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from

forging, he must be not a patient but an _impatient_. He must be

personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the

active not the passive will.

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we

desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which

have distinguished European civilisation, we shall not discourage the

thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If we want, like

the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of

course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly

want to _make_ them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern

attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The

thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if

the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good

man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but

that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents

for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that

omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God,

to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all

creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.

For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that

the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this indeed I

approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I

apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent

touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly

feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a

distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some

unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is

written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy

God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in

Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted

God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of

pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it

was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which

confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists

choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the

world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of

unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been

in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech) but

let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one

divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which

God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which the

chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform;

and of which the chief defect is that it is obviously only an abstract

assertion. Its main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and

manly of all theologies. Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a

theology. It can always be urged against it that it is in its nature

arbitrary and in the air. But it is not so high in the air but that

great archers spend their whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and

their last arrows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their

civilisation if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the

last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will

use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and

the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the

Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom

and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration;

I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as

an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin

against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a

mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were

guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a

passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death

that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence

now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other;

in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot

go to Hartlepool. I have known people who protested against religious

education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's

mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have

known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by

showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical

purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they

smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat

it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered

furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks

this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic

who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very

existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims

not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the

emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by

which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some

one who never lived at all.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only

succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do

not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common

sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could

they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is

not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have

been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should

not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality

they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter;

they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete

one here. With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out

wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make

it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall and Snelgrove. Not only

is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the

fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked

divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that

is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid

waste the world.

CHAPTER IX.--_Authority and the Adventurer_

The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that orthodoxy

is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or

order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and

advance. If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do

it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the

old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or

lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that

matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that

mind precedes matter. If we wish specially to awaken people to social

vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by

insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best

reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the

transcendant God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means

divine discontent. If we wish particularly to assert the idea of a

generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall

instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire

European civilisation to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather

that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal.

And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather

wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere

sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in

favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The _rules_ of a club are

occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always

in favour of the rich one.

And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes the whole

matter. A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so

far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found a practical

philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well. You have found a side

of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Original Sin;

all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I

congratulate you. You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God

look outwards and are progressive; I congratulate them. But even

supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you

take the truths and leave the doctrines? Granted that all modern

society is trusting the rich too much because it does not allow for

human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage

because (believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why

cannot you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the

Fall? If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents a

healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea of danger

and leave the idea of damnation? If you see clearly the kernel of

common-sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply

take the kernel and leave the nut? Why cannot you (to use that cant

phrase of the newspapers which I, as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a

little ashamed of using) why cannot you simply take what is good in

Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend,

and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature

incomprehensible?" This is the real question; this is the last question;

and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.

The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to

have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. If I am treating

man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me to

believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd psychological reason,

that I can deal better with a man's exercise of freewill if I believe

that he has got it. But I am in this matter yet more definitely a

rationalist. I do not propose to turn this book into one of ordinary

Christian apologetics; I should be glad to meet at any other time the

enemies of Christianity in that more obvious arena. Here I am only

giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. But I may

pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments

against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that

having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense,

I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the

Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. In case the argument

should be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic

I will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions on

the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in

Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an

intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it

quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in

that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged

demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous

facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to

Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such

scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well

be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book,

one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the

things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that

they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the

average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up

of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences

for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences

against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I

simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true

tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. Let us take cases.

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the

pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that

men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very

much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that

primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have

blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian

arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and

legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I

discover) is that they are all untrue. If you leave off looking at books

about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if

you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the

farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man

is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his

divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is,

in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so

insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands

is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having

hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or

the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of

barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build

colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint

even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many

camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees

have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilisation; but

that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. Who

ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?

Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of

old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural

explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the

only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are

tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic,

either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason

for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is

exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance

rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began

in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the

foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none.

Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent

reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture

that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and

that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and

the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way. In the

earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia,

human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as

something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by

the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was

kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the

whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed,

the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity.

Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true

because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with

these paradoxes.

And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view

that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and

simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe which are

still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is

still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air.

Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of

a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the

pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat

grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall

round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic

game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were

knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not

fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled

in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make an

agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. I am left saying,

"Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man

among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient

happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the

countries of the Catholic Church." One explanation, at any rate, covers

all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by

some explosion or revelation such as people now call "psychic." Once

Heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God,

whereby man took command of Nature; and once again (when in empire after

empire men had been found wanting) Heaven came to save mankind in the

awful shape of a man. This would explain why the mass of men always look

backwards; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards

is the little continent where Christ has His Church. I know it will be

said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an answer

when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really only mean,

"Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much to insist on my

own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the

ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four

odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the

facts I always found they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian

arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the

moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in combination

create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased.

First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and

unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that

Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and

that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people

still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people as

the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention

these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them

independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical,

but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking at books

and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.

There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair

parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an

extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision,

flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy

of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a

being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god. Christ

had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think,

elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the _a fortiori_.

His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in

the clouds. The diction used _about_ Christ has been, and perhaps

wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite

curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and

mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called

himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold

their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side

of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if

anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by

calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one

consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must

remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given;

Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may

blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that

does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some

supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity

belongs to the dark ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading

modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found

that Christianity, so far from belonging to the dark ages, was the one

path across the dark ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge

connecting two shining civilisations. If any one says that the faith

arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It

arose in the Mediterranean civilisation in the full summer of the Roman

Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain

as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is

perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more

extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering,

with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion

did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the

load of waters; after being buried under the débris of dynasties and

clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of

the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if

the civilisation ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged)

it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian

Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life

of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch

and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most

absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all

heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back

into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us

out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from

those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant

by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a

statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is

constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we

refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at

what is _done_ about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only

practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country,

the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they

were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so

much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that

ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of

its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who

have forced their masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call

priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And

when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the

same. Irishmen are best at the specially _hard_ professions--the trades

of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I

came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by

the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too

credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopædias. Again the

three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The

average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in

the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediæval darkness and the

political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to

ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this

incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a

living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilisation

and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last

of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice

that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the

most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?"

There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from

outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of

a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due

to the great human civilisations such as the old Egyptian or the

existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that

only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal

recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest

facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with

dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost

indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is

in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained

as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life

working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilisation _ought_

to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the

Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our

estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all

_revenants_; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just

as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon,

something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life--it

is not too much to say that it has had the _jumps_--ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to

convey the main contention--that my own case for Christianity is

rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts,

like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic

has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of

reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages

were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but

it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks

were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but

they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale,

but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold;

because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it

isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a

railway train.

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course,

one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly, but

by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In

another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition

that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is

just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my

own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than

material fate, is, I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call

it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere

emotion, it is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a

_primary_ intellectual conviction like the certainty of self or the good

of living. Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God

merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief

that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at

all; I believe in them upon human evidence as I do in the discovery of

America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only

requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary

idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly

and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection

with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in

miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence

for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly)

because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic

thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a

miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony

to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word

about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the

landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy

agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with

evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it

comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony

in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one

of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either

because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That

is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the

main principle of materialism--the abstract impossibility of miracle.

You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the

dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you

rationalists who refuse actual evidence, being constrained to do so by

your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and

looking impartially into certain miracles of mediæval and modern times,

I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against

these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediæval

documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain

battles," they answer, "But mediævals were superstitious"; if I want to

know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that

they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am

told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the

only answer is--that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only

stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because

they say they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is

another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against

miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.

He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories a notion of

spiritual preparation and acceptance: in short, that the miracle could

only come to him who believed in it. It may be so, and if it is so how

are we to test it? If we are inquiring whether certain results follow

faith, it is useless to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do

follow faith. If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith

have a most healthy right to laugh. But they have no right to judge.

Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk; still if we

were extracting psychological facts from drunkards, it would be absurd

to be always taunting them with having been drunk. Suppose we were

investigating whether angry men really saw a red mist before their eyes.

Suppose sixty excellent householders swore that when angry they had seen

this crimson cloud: surely it would be absurd to answer "Oh, but you

admit you were angry at the time." They might reasonably rejoin (in a

stentorian chorus), "How the blazes could we discover, without being

angry, whether angry people see red?" So the saints and ascetics might

rationally reply, "Suppose that the question is whether believers can

see visions--even then, if you are interested in visions it is no point

to object to believers." You are still arguing in a circle--in that old

mad circle with which this book began.

The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common

sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical

experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of

pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in

connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a

dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that

it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their

senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts

prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact

that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love. If you

choose to say, "I will believe that Miss Brown called her _fiancé_ a

periwinkle or any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word

before seventeen psychologists," then I shall reply, "Very well, if

those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she

certainly will not say it." It is just as unscientific as it is

unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere

certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is as if I said that I

could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough;

or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.

As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex

or about midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own

nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to

it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves

or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen,

farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all

know men who testify to spiritualist incidents but are not

spiritualists; the fact that science itself admits such things more and

more every day. Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it

Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has

thought of another word for it. I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the

strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural

things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or

of materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism. The sceptic

always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not

be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. For I hope

we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere

recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That

is not an argument at all, good or bad. A false ghost disproves the

reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the

existence of the Bank of England--if anything, it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence

for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the

worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the nineteenth

century was this: that men began to use the word "spiritual" as the same

as the word "good." They thought that to grow in refinement and

uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was

announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did

worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so

long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. But

you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius, very

typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin

Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was

indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side

of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all

the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of

arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good. Between this

sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must

suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them, must

make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other

varied types in any other distant continent. It must be hard at first to

know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose from the

under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite

understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose

that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind

him a kicking and imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for

the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to

find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the

gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural

phenomena--in order to discover which are really natural. In this light

I find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,

quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told that the

Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any research to

tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun

and the moon looked the same size. It is only slowly that we learn that

the sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our

satellite. Believing that there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in

it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and

think good. Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil

at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land

of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and

comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am

literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found.

I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such an explanation

is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground

of belief. In pure records of experiment (if these be taken

democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that

miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our

tradition. But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real

reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of

Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.

I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as

a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And

that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my

soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught

me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw

suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see

suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw

why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were

shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has

startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with

any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still

living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture

to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything

with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes

to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and

Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some

truth that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to

this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all

began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees

stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best

out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an

entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My

father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously)

the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your

father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a

thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth

to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it

was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom

this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss

about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes

to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule

education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be

taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real

thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by

women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the

masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk

to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not

join their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact; that the

very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of

flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit

they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said);

therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful

fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy

after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it

was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I

had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere

unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood

was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which

could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was

the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy

conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.

So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not merely as a

chance example, I have found Europe and the world once more like the

little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; I

look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or

that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but

I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and

flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is

also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his

existence. I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any

instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which

has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not

at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only

a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human

nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved

Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest

of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a

woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world

(even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous

idolatry of sexual innocence--the great modern worship of children. For

any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt

by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with

the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the

church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is

universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to

be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates,

I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human

experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is

one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the

sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion

and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I

do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth,

but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies

say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has

again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is

true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive;

it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden. Theosophists,

for instance, will preach an obviously attractive idea like

re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are

spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a man is a

beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the

beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such

as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and

brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original

sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science

offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we

discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.

Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only

afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise highly

beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards that we realise that

this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument

for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular parts

of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the

people. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical

abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you

will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine

like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in

the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that

is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

And its despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is

any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any

romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any

adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of

adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority. One can find

no meanings in a jungle of scepticism; but the man will find more and

more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. Here

everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in

my father's house; for it is my father's house. I end where I began--at

the right end. I have entered at least the gate of all good philosophy.

I have come into my second childhood.

But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has one final

mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter I

will attempt to express it. All the real argument about religion turns

on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when

he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the

ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that

the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of

the Fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge's interesting new Catechism, the first two

questions were: "What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the

Fall of Man?" I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the

questions; but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic

answers. To the question, "What are you?" I could only answer, "God

knows." And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer

with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself." This is

the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any

full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more

natural to us than ourselves. And there is really no test of this except

the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of

the padded cell and the open door. It is only since I have known

orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation. But, in conclusion, it

has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy.

It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of

sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow

and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead

nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only

matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or

divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was

(in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder

and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best

Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed,

an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it

is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the

pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of

the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the

pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the

gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the

fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say

that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from

their point of view they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they

mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the

ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in

the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about

existence, about everything, while mediævals were happy about that at

least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only

miserable about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.

I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace

about everything--they were at war about everything else. But if the

question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more

cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in

the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a

gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but

sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly)

it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more

manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the

superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and

fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the

soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the

uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the

apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this

primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be

expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to

one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the

agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This

is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to

be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies,

while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are

actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on

his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has

found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and

perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies

it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic

and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf

because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless

silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is

a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick room.

We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because

the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken

farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the

tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber

of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to

hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret

of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the

strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again

haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the

Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the

thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,

almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing

their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His

open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city.

Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists

are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He

flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how

they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained

something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering

personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something

that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was

something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous

isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show

us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it

was His mirth.