when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling
cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea voyages were not so quick, but were
quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ
had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had
some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen
with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed
with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;
which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few
Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic
tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a
divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems
to me to prove nothing at all.
_'Daily News.'_
NOVEMBER 24th
Sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien
invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too
self-indulgent and diffuse; sometimes to prevent the growth in the
state of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it.
Above all, it may happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen
may be to do the exact opposite of the work the Radicals had to do. It
may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he
can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and
sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture.
_Introduction to 'A Child's History of England.'_
NOVEMBER 25th
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is
to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER 26th
We talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But
I sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life
itself. At least this is true: that in proportion as passions become
real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet.
All real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm;
and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. However
this may be, it is unquestionable in the case of great public affairs.
Whenever you have real practical politics you have poetical politics.
Whenever men have succeeded in wars they have sung war-songs; whenever
you have the useful triumph you have also the useless trophy.
But the thing is more strongly apparent exactly where the great
Fabian falls foul of it--in the open scenes of history and the actual
operation of events. The things that actually did happen all over the
world are precisely the things which he thinks could not have happened
in Galilee, the artistic isolations, the dreadful dialogues in which
each speaker was dramatic, the prophecies flung down like gauntlets,
the high invocations of history, the marching and mounting excitement
of the story, the pulverizing and appropriate repartees. These things
do happen; they have happened; they are attested, in all the cases
where the soul of man had become poetic in its very peril. At every one
of its important moments the most certain and solid history reads like
an historical novel.
_'Daily News.'_
NOVEMBER 27th
Anyone could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. But great
masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. Their
cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play;
and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance.
_Introduction to 'Christmas Stories.'_
NOVEMBER 28th
Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.
In youth I sought the prince of men
Captain in cosmic wars.
Our Titan even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.
But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.
_'The Wild Knight.'_
NOVEMBER 29th
There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to
common and necessary things, but the things that are so touched are
the ancient things, the things that always, to some extent, commended
themselves to the lover of beauty. The spirit of William Morris has not
seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful.
And this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not
the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from
the Beast and the fairy tale had a different ending.
_'Twelve Types.'_
NOVEMBER 30th _ST. ANDREW'S DAY_
I am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am quite certain that
nationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite certain that all our
success with Scotland has been due to the fact that we have in spirit
treated it as a nation. I am quite certain that Ireland is a nation.
I am quite certain that nationality is the key of Ireland; I am quite
certain that all our failure in Ireland arose from the fact that we
would not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be difficult to
find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger
example of the immensely superior importance of sentiment, to what is
called practicality, than this case of the two sister nations. It is
not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that
we have encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have
encouraged a Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely
encouraged a Scotchman to be Scotch.
_'All Things Considered.'_
DECEMBER
DECEMBER 1st
In this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small
things: rather we go on and discover big things. It is the detail
that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly, and
some men die never having seen it at all. We see certain squadrons in
certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or
that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time
to realize what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom.
So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours,
deeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We
cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin
of all the trouble.
_'William Blake.'_
DECEMBER 2nd
Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the
world, but our folly belongs to those we love.
_'Browning.'_
DECEMBER 3rd
Our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and
not worry about whether it was hygienic. They were big enough to get
into small rooms.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
DECEMBER 4th
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic
philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a
private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
_Introduction to 'Book of Job.'_
DECEMBER 5th
That Christianity is identical with democracy, is the hardest of
gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying
that they are all the sons of God.
_'Twelve Types.'_
DECEMBER 6th _ST. NICHOLAS'S DAY_
All the old wholesome customs in connexion with Christmas were to the
effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something
before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance,
children were never given their presents until the actual coming of
the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper
parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes
accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect
of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. The editors of the
magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time
that the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the turkey of last
year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the
turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be
tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration,
I should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the
leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to
individual choice.
_'All Things Considered.'_
DECEMBER 7th
We had talked for about half an hour about politics and God; for men
always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is
because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God
is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of
a moustache.
_'The Club of Queer Trades.'_
DECEMBER 8th
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism,
which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor
to the universe.
_'The Man who was Thursday.'_
DECEMBER 9th
There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
God; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of
a flower (or a firework) comes to our hearts with a kind of authority
and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or
features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the
whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the
child comes the woman--she understands.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
DECEMBER 10th
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without
any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of
doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any
other man can love the rewards of it.
_'Browning.'_
DECEMBER 11th
Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most
universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have
forgotten that they are living on a star.
_'Defendant.'_
DECEMBER 12th _BROWNING DIED_
The poem, 'Old Pictures in Florence,' suggests admirably that a sense
of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of
completeness: that the part may easily and obviously be greater than
the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in
drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life.
For nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only
world that we have known, or of which we could ever dream, the fact
does remain that we have named it 'a strange world.' In other words,
we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that
something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And
Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness
implies completeness, life implies immortality. The second of the
great Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. It can
only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of
God--that is to say, that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if
they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. He held that
these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might--to use a yet more
strange expression--have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has
self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the universe a secret
and blasphemous superiority. And this tremendous story of a divine
jealousy Browning reads into the story of the Crucifixion. These are
emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning, which I
have ventured to characterize roughly as the hope in the imperfection
of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. They
are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise
noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit
will never answer or exhaust.
_'Robert Browning.'_
DECEMBER 13th
Elder father, though thine eyes
Shine with hoary mysteries,
Canst thou tell what in the heart
Of a cowslip blossom lies?
Smaller than all lives that be,
Secret as the deepest sea,
Stands a little house of seeds
Like an elfin's granary.
Speller of the stones and weeds,
Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds,
Tell me what is in the heart
Of the smallest of the seeds.
God Almighty, and with Him
Cherubim and Seraphim
Filling all Eternity--
Adonai Elohim.
_'The Wild Knight.'_
DECEMBER 14th
The rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing
is to miss it. Chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go
anywhere--to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician and his
whole magic is in this that he does say 'Victoria,' and lo! it is
Victoria.
_'The Man who was Thursday.'_
DECEMBER 15th
Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something
specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not
only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of
being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They
alone admit all matters: they alone lie open to all attacks.... There
is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay
confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a
donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and
sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology.
_'G. F. Watts.'_
DECEMBER 16th
The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising
politician--that is to say, he was a pleasant youth with flat fair hair
and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates.
In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was
simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it and was called
brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was
no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a club of
his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly like a
schoolboy.
_'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_
DECEMBER 17th
The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the
impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common
personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of
God.
_'William Blake.'_
DECEMBER 18th
The world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical
optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible
worlds.... Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived
such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as
miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
DECEMBER 19th
The educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen custom of
considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain
a secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor, on
the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and
they are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at
the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. The way
to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful
crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who
must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply
the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts
and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet
and the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
DECEMBER 20th
A crime is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; crimes are
by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop.
But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable
mark--I mean that the centre of it is simple, however the entourage may
be complicated.
_'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_
DECEMBER 21st _ST. THOMAS'S DAY_
It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back
to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of
doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine
and the Freethinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine
horribly. The rationalists made me question whether reason was of any
use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far
as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.
As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures, the
dreadful thought broke into my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian.'
_'Orthodoxy.'_
DECEMBER 22nd
Pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the
working classes are turning with indignant scorn from the churches.
The working classes are not indignant against the churches in the
least. The things the working classes really are indignant against are
the hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of
theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the
temples of physical science.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
DECEMBER 23rd
A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels.
In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, He has
partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a
turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour
or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather
increased than diminished.
_'All Things Considered.'_
DECEMBER 24th _CHRISTMAS EVE_
THE TRUCE OF CHRISTMAS
Passionate peace is in the sky--
And in the snow in silver sealed
The beasts are perfect in the field,
And men seem men so suddenly--
(But take ten swords and ten times ten
And blow the bugle in praising men;
For we are for all men under the sun,
And they are against us every one;
And misers haggle and madmen clutch
And there is peril in praising much,
And we have the terrible tongues uncurled
That praise the world to the sons of the world).
The idle humble hill and wood
Are bowed about the sacred birth,
And for one little hour the earth
Is lazy with the love of good--
(But ready are you, and ready am I,
If the battle blow and the guns go by;
For we are for all men under the sun,
And they are against us every one;
And the men that hate herd all together,
To pride and gold, and the great white feather,
And the thing is graven in star and stone
That the men who love are all alone).
Hunger is hard and time is tough,
But bless the beggars and kiss the kings,
For hope has broken the heart of things,
And nothing was ever praised enough.
(But hold the shield for a sudden swing
And point the sword when you praise a thing,
For we are for all men under the sun,
And they are against us every one,
And mime and merchant, thane and thrall
Hate us because we love them all,
Only till Christmastide go by
Passionate peace is in the sky).
_'The Commonwealth.'_
DECEMBER 25th _CHRISTMAS DAY_
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the Yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam,
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home:
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost--how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.
This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
_The House of Christmas: 'Daily News.'_
DECEMBER 26th _BOXING DAY_
There are innumerable persons with eyeglasses and green garments who
pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian Games. But there is
about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests
that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. If so, where
is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a
solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in
the streets, and they think it vulgar. If this is so, let them be very
certain of this: that they are the kind of people who in the time of
the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of
the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage
vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian Games would have thought the
Olympian Games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that
they were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean
coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and
some heavy drinking: vulgarity there always was, wherever there was
joy, wherever there was faith in the gods.
_'Heretics.'_
DECEMBER 27th _ST. JOHN'S DAY_
Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved
men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a
gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure
to think of an equally distributed love is that their love of humanity
is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own
theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.
_'Twelve Types.'_
DECEMBER 28th _HOLY INNOCENTS' DAY_
That little urchin with the gold-red hair (whom I have just watched
toddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered;
her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's. No; all the kingdoms
of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. The winds
of the world shall be tempered to that lamb unshorn. All crowns that
cannot fit her head shall be broken; all raiment and building that does
not harmonize with her glory shall waste away. Her mother may bid her
bind her hair, for that is natural authority; but the Emperor of the
Planet shall not bid her cut it off. She is the human and sacred image;
all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the
pillars of society shall be shaken and the roofs of ages come rushing
down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
DECEMBER 29th _ST. THOMAS À BECKET_
When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
Canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black
admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for
his brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we
realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before
they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the
great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world.
Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice.
And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being
tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself _sub judice_. The kings
were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible
kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn
publicly all the kingdoms of the earth.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
DECEMBER 30th
Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that
it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word that could only
rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.
_'Heretics.'_
DECEMBER 31st
With all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that
no man knows: whether the world is old or young.
_'The Defendant.'_
THE MOVEABLE FEASTS
ADVENT SUNDAY
People, if you have any prayers,
Say prayers for me;
And lay me under a Christian stone
In this lost land I thought my own,
To wait till the holy horn be blown
And all poor men are free.
_'Ballad of Alfred.'_
SHROVE TUESDAY
Why should I care for the Ages
Because they are old and grey?
To me like sudden laughter
The stars are fresh and gay;
The world is a daring fancy
And finished yesterday.
Why should I bow to the Ages
Because they are drear and dry?
Slow trees and ripening meadows
For me go roaring by,
A living charge, a struggle
To escalade the sky.
The eternal suns and systems,
Solid and silent all,
To me are stars of an instant,
Only the fires that fall
From God's good rocket rising
On this night of carnival.
_'A Novelty' ('The Wild Knight')._
ASH WEDNESDAY
Nor shall all iron doors make dumb
Men wondering ceaselessly,
If it be not better to fast for joy
Than feast for misery?
_'Ballad of Alfred.'_
PALM SUNDAY
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will,
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.