'Sorry' does not cut it, but it is the only thing I can say

To You who came by. Who judged and doomed. I made a mistake. I apologized.
This does not make me a person who is totally lost and bad.
My strong political views are based on the Christian values, and that is why I am very, very regretful.

Now, take the first stone, you who are without guilt.

We start again.

This white space, to be filled with letters, words, sentences...
Does it intimidate you sometimes? Like when you have a deadline and nothing to write about. Or when your boss is expecting something profound, and the only thing you want to muse about is the behaviour of your cats ;)

Around this time in 2006 I got saved.

Seven years ago. a tiny drop in the time continuum of eternity. For me, the seven most formative years of my life. Of denying myself and taking up His Cross. Of putting up with loss of friends, with people's quiet disapproval and with tiny signs behind my back.

And the REWARD. Beyond understanding, above anything else. And the answered prayers.

And the crises. Moving to another town, church. Depressions. All that which life brings on its rich plate.

LOVE. PATIENCE. HOPE.

The aftermath of a move

This whole year up to this point has been one crazy roller coaster. No wonder my blog showed no sign of life, being squashed under the pile of duties, obligations and stress. Somebody said that a move is more stressful than a death in the family, and I am almost prone to agreeing with that one.
We moved. Slowly, painstakingly, sometimes against our own lazy selves, we made the decision and put it into action. Had it only been a moving of stuff, enough in itself to drive a family crazy, we would have thought it fun and exciting. Do not misunderstand me: the whole physical process started in March and is ALMOST over. Which of course does not mean that all rooms in the present house are perfectly furnished and ordered :)
But the most tearing part of a move is THE CHANGE. You know what you have, and you expect to have it better in the new place, but the very thought of change is oh so terrifying!
I had to let go of people and places. I had to let go of my nice job. But most of all, I had to let go of my stubborn idea of "doing it all by myself". It worked to a certain point. And then it stopped working, because I needed to learn who is in control.
Having been a control freak all my life, letting go and letting God was not easy. Yet, looking at it now, in due perspective, I regret not understanding it earlier. Because, you see, that is the only way.
The situation now? A happy, harmonious (normal ;) ) family, kids enjoying their new school, both parents enjoying their new full-time employments. That's about the material status.

The more important status is the spiritual one, with the glorious realisation that I can cast all my burdens onto Him, that my faith needed testing and the fire of purification, and that I am nothing without Him.
To God be the Glory forever and ever.

Mówienie w co wierzysz jest bardziej zrozumiałe, niż powiedzieć "kalwinista"

Jesteśmy chrześcijanami. Radykalnymi, pełnokrwistymi, nasyconymi Biblią, wywyższającymi Chrystusa, skupionymi na Bogu, działającymi misyjnie, zdobywającymi dusze, kochającymi kościół, szukającymi świętości, ceniącymi Bożą suwerenność, ogłupiałymi na punkcie łaski, ze złamanymi sercami, szczęśliwymi naśladowcami wszechmocnego, ukrzyżowanego Chrystusa. Takimi przynajmniej staramy się być.

Innymi słowy, jesteśmy kalwinistami. Ale używanie teologicznej łatki, nie jest tak przydatne jak mówienie ludziom w co wierzysz. Więc zapomnij o łatce, i powiedz im jasno bez wykrętów i niejasności w co wierzysz o zbawieniu.

Jeśli spytają, "Jesteś kalwinistą?" odpowiedz, "Sam zdecyduj. Oto w co wierzę..."

Wierzę że jestem tak duchowo zepsuty, dumny i buntowniczy że sam nigdy nie doszedłbym do wiary w Jezusa bez Bożego miłosierdzia, suwerennie zwyciężającego ostatnie bastiony mojego buntu. (1 Koryntian 2:14; Efezjan 2:1-4; Rzymian 8:7)

Wierzę że Bóg wybrał mnie bym był jego dzieckiem przed założeniem świata, na podstawie niczego co jest we mnie, wcześniej znanego lub inaczej. (Efezjan 1:4-6; Dzieje 13:48; Rzymian 8:29-30; 11:5-7)

Wierzę że Chrystus umarł w zastępstwie grzeszników dając prawdziwą ofertę zbawienia dla wszystkich ludzi, i że miał w swojej śmierci plan by nabyć swoją wybrankę, a dokładniej, zebrać wszystkich wierzących, których imiona są od wieczności zapisane w księdze życia należącej do Baranka który został zabity. (Jan 3:16; Jan 10;15; Efezjan 5:25; Objawienia 13:8)

Gdy byłem martwy w swoich grzechach i ślepy na piękno Chrystusa, Bóg mnie ożywił, otworzył oczy mojego serca, dał mi możliwość uwierzyć, zjednoczył mnie z Jezusem, wraz ze wszystkimi korzyściami przebaczenia, usprawiedliwienia i wiecznego życia. (Efezjan 2:4-5; 2 Koryntian 4:6; Filipian 2:29; Efezjan 2:8-9; Dzieje 16:14; Efezjan 1:7; Filipian 3:9)

Jestem wiecznie bezpieczny nie z powodu czegokolwiek co zrobiłem w przeszłości, ale ponieważ Bóg jest zdecydowany i wierny by dokończyć dzieło jakie zaczął - utrzymać moją wiarę, zachować mnie od apostazji, i powstrzymać mnie od grzechu który prowadzi do śmierci. (1 Koryntian 1:8-9; 1 Tesaloniczan 5:23-24; Filipian 1:6; 1 Piotra 1:5; Judy 1:25; Jana 10:28-29; 1 Jana 5:16)

Nazywaj to jak chcesz, to jest moje życie. Wierzę w to ponieważ widzę to w Biblii. I ponieważ tego doświadczyłem. Niech na wieki będzie chwalona wielkość Bożej łaski!

Some New Year Bible Readings

This passing of time has finally caught up with me. Not that I feel awfully old yet, but, nevertheless, the realization of the number of years makes itself louder and louder in my consciousness. When days like today come, they point me towards the end of it all more and more stubbornly.
You live your little life, day by day, hour by hour, without as much as giving the slightest thought about why - where to - who for - how questions. Until the day some misfortune happens to you, or some physical problem gets to you. Then you suddenly understand you are not invincible and immortal, and you start to question the reasons and the results.

Ecclesiastes 1
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
See, this is new?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

12 I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem.
13 And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.
14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.

16 I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
18 For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

The words of David fit perfectly into the state of mind a human being is confronted with while pondering over these things. There is no hope, no purpose, no gain, ultimately. If this were the only message there is, we would indeed be pitiful and miserable creatures (well, this last word is not politically correct, because the ONLY PC nowadays is spontaneous becoming out of the primordial soup). Fortunately, as Dave Berlinski says, "atheism is an adolescent preoccupation", and hopefully people grow out of it at some point.
My second quotation from the Bible is from Jeremiah, where the words of despair and utter hopelessness are followed by the words of hope and purpose. God is Good, isn't He?

Jeremiah 10
1 Hear the word that the LORD speaks to you, O house of Israel.
2 Thus says the LORD:
Learn not the way of the nations,
nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
3 for the customs of the peoples are vanity.
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
4 They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so that it cannot move.
5 Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak;
they have to be carried,
for they cannot walk.
Do not be afraid of them,
for they cannot do evil,
neither is it in them to do good.
6 There is none like you, O LORD;
you are great, and your name is great in might.
7 Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?
For this is your due;
for among all the wise ones of the nations
and in all their kingdoms
there is none like you.
8 They are both stupid and foolish;
the instruction of idols is but wood!
9 Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish,
and gold from Uphaz.
They are the work of the craftsman and of the hands of the goldsmith;
their clothing is violet and purple;
they are all the work of skilled men.
10 But the LORD is the true God;
he is the living God and the everlasting King.
At his wrath the earth quakes,
and the nations cannot endure his indignation.

11 Thus shall you say to them: The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.
12 It is he who made the earth by his power,
who established the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
13 When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,
and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.
He makes lightning for the rain,
and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses.
14 Every man is stupid and without knowledge;
every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols,
for his images are false,
and there is no breath in them.
15 They are worthless, a work of delusion;
at the time of their punishment they shall perish.
16 Not like these is he who is the portion of Jacob,
for he is the one who formed all things,
and Israel is the tribe of his inheritance;
the LORD of hosts is his name.
17 Gather up your bundle from the ground,
O you who dwell under siege!
18 For thus says the LORD:
Behold, I am slinging out the inhabitants of the land
at this time,
and I will bring distress on them,
that they may feel it.
19 Woe is me because of my hurt!
My wound is grievous.
But I said, Truly this is an affliction,
and I must bear it.
20 My tent is destroyed,
and all my cords are broken;
my children have gone from me,
and they are not;
there is no one to spread my tent again
and to set up my curtains.
21 For the shepherds are stupid
and do not inquire of the LORD;
therefore they have not prospered,
and all their flock is scattered.
22 A voice, a rumor! Behold, it comes!—
a great commotion out of the north country
to make the cities of Judah a desolation,
a lair of jackals.
23 I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself,
that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.
24 Correct me, O LORD, but in justice;
not in your anger, lest you bring me to nothing.
25 Pour out your wrath on the nations that know you not,
and on the peoples that call not on your name,
for they have devoured Jacob;
they have devoured him and consumed him,
and have laid waste his habitation.

Taking a break

The duties of work and family, and the survival mode because of these, make me take a break in this blogging activity. I simply cannot find time to think, write, edit, and evaluate.

I will come back, as soon as I find my rythm and put my life in order.

God Bless...

If only I could...

The Certificate Program The Certificate program of Ligonier Academy of Biblical and Theological Studies is a non-degree distance education curriculum designed for laypeople, ministers, and educators who desire a structured way to study biblical and theological subjects at their own pace, at their own level of interest, and in their own home. Ligonier Academy offers three levels of study in the Certificate program: Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced. Introductory Level The Introductory Level certificates are designed for those who are looking to cover the basics. These certificates assume no prior study of the subject matter. The topics of study available at the introductory level are: Biblical Studies Theology Philosophy Apologetics Church History (Available soon) The tuition for the Introductory certificates is $175. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below. Introductory Level Certificates Intermediate Level The Intermediate Level certificates are designed for those who have mastered the basics and would like to study a topic more thoroughly. These certificates assume minimal prior study. These programs will include instruction and tutelage from Dr. Keith Mathison, Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr., and Dr. Fowler White. The topics of study available at the intermediate level are: Biblical Studies Systematic Theology Church History Philosophy Apologetics The tuition for the Intermediate certificates is $350. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below. Intermediate Level Certificates Advanced Level The Advanced Level certificates are designed for those who desire an in-depth study of a particular subject. These certificates assume prior study and a willingness to do a large amount of reading over the course of two to three years.These programs will include instruction and tutelage from Dr. Keith Mathison, Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr., and Dr. Fowler White. The topics of study available at the advanced level are: Biblical Studies Systematic Theology Church History Philosophy Apologetics Ethics Historical Theology Theology of the Westminster Confession Christian Studies The tuition for the Advanced certificates is $500. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below. Advanced Level Certificates We encourage potential students to examine the course requirements carefully in order to determine which certificate is best suited to his or her interests.

Christian Dating- LaneCh & Susan Yenser

I love them both, two very dear friends of mine.

Chesterton, Heretics, 10

On Sandals and Simplicity

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not);it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them. A Frenchman can be proud of being bold and logical, and still remain bold and logical.A German can be proud of being reflective and orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly. But an Englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct, and still remain simple and direct.In the matter of these strange virtues, to know them is to kill them.A man may be conscious of being heroic or conscious of being divine,but he cannot (in spite of all the Anglo-Saxon poets) be conscious of being unconscious.

Now, I do not think that it can be honestly denied that some portion of this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own opinion, at least, to the school of Anglo-Saxonism. I mean that school of the simple life, commonly associated with Tolstoy.If a perpetual talk about one's own robustness leads to being less robust, it is even more true that a perpetual talking about one's own simplicity leads to being less simple.One great complaint, I think, must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life--the simple life in all its varied forms,from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things.They would make us simple in the things that do not matter--that is, in diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system.But they would make us complex in the things that do matter--in philosophy,in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection.It does not so very much matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind. The only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys.There may be a reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this;there can surely be no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it.There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached--"plain living and high thinking."These people do not stand in need of, will not be improved by,plain living and high thinking. They stand in need of the contrary.They would be improved by high living and plain thinking.A little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility,a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world. It would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is, if anything, older than the natural.It would teach them that the loving-cup is as old as any hunger.It would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion.And a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fancifulare the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow.

A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him,with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that."High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war.High living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. And plain thinkingwill convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart.If that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing;but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched.If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early Victorianarmchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entree intoa simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a complexold gentleman. So long as human society will leave my spiritualinside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission, to workits wild will with my physical interior. I will submit to cigars.I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy. I will humble myselfto a hansom cab. If only by this means I may preserve to myselfthe virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear.I do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it.I incline to the belief that there are others. But I will havenothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment,and the joy alike. I will have nothing to do with the devilishvision of a child who is too simple to like toys.

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide.And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothingdoes he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity,than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure,even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harpsalways on the distinction between the natural and the artificial.The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction.To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and asartificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are naturalbut both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained.The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with whichSam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the goldof fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rusticchild is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritualor philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men payfor them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that menare killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them.The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain.The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that theyare not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical,but that men are mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view,a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habitor social routine. The things we need most for immediate practicalpurposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot,a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerlyand angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should,ipso facto, be living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense.Desire and danger make every one simple. And to those who talk to uswith interfering eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin,and about Plasmon and the coats of the stomach, at them shall onlybe hurled the words that are hurled at fops and gluttons, "Take nothought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal yeshall be clothed. For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,and all these things shall be added unto you." Those amazingwords are not only extraordinarily good, practical politics;they are also superlatively good hygiene. The one supreme wayof making all those processes go right, the processes of health,and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of makingcertain of their accuracy, is to think about something else.If a man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may bequite easy about the pores of his skin. If he harnesses his waggonto a star, the process will have a most satisfactory effect uponthe coats of his stomach. For the thing called "taking thought,"the thing for which the best modern word is "rationalizing,"is in its nature, inapplicable to all plain and urgent things.Men take thought and ponder rationalistically, touching remote things--things that only theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus.But only at their peril can men rationalize about so practicala matter as health.

Chesterton, Heretics, 9

The Moods of Mr. George Moore

Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases.He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted,has a genuine mental power. His account of his reason for leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable tribute to that communion which has been written of late years.For the fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating.Mr. Moore hates Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which he lives. Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of other people.Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the dreamer.It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that troubles him,but the dogma of the reality of this world.

The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the only coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily justified in life.One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or faith--that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man.Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot understand Stevenson. Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected,that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a certain kind of defence. Thackeray understood this,and therefore Mr. Moore does not understand Thackeray. Now, one of these very practical and working mysteries in the Christian tradition,and one which the Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best work in singling out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride.Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter,it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.The Christian tradition understands this; therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition.

For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal doctrine of the sin of pride. It is not only true that humility is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.It is also true that vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. Vanity is social--it is almost a kind of comradeship;pride is solitary and uncivilized. Vanity is active;it desires the applause of infinite multitudes; pride is passive,desiring only the applause of one person, which it already has.Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even of itself;pride is dull, and cannot even smile. And the whole of this difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,who, as he informs us, has "brushed Stevenson aside." I do not know where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having a good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism.Hence Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity;while the richest effects of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden from his eyes.

If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics,we shall not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by,while Mr. Moore is always walking the world looking for a new one.Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility.Self is the gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.

It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because itis really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr. Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant and influential aesthetic weakness as well.We should really be much more interested in Mr. Moore if he werenot quite so interested in himself. We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really fine pictures, into each of which,by some useless and discordant convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same attitude. "The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore," "Effect of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist,""Mr. Moore by Firelight," "Ruins of Mr. Moore by Moonlight,"and so on, seems to be the endless series. He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself.But the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed.One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.Thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe;trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything.If, on the other hand, a man is sensible enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his own individual way.He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has ever known.This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's "Confessions."In reading them we do not feel the presence of a clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.We only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are calledupon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore.He is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism,realism and mysticism--he or rather his name. He is profoundly absorbed even in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be.And he intrudes the capital "I" even where it need not be intruded--even where it weakens the force of a plain statement.Where another man would say, "It is a fine day," Mr. Moore says,"Seen through my temperament, the day appeared fine."Where another man would say "Milton has obviously a fine style,"Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had always impressed me."The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being totally ineffectual. Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin.Even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of falsehood. Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest.One Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without--pugnacity;and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age.But he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting;but they will always prevent him winning.

Chesterton, Heretics, 8

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

There is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or anothernowadays against the influence of that new journalism which isassociated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson.But almost everybody who attacks it attacks on the ground that itis very sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling.I am speaking in no affected contrariety, but in the simplicityof a genuine personal impression, when I say that this journalismoffends as being not sensational or violent enough. The real viceis not that it is startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame.The whole object is to keep carefully along a certain level of theexpected and the commonplace; it may be low, but it must take carealso to be flat. Never by any chance in it is there any of that realplebeian pungency which can be heard from the ordinary cabman inthe ordinary street. We have heard of a certain standard of decorumwhich demands that things should be funny without being vulgar,but the standard of this decorum demands that if things are vulgarthey shall be vulgar without being funny. This journalism doesnot merely fail to exaggerate life--it positively underrates it;and it has to do so because it is intended for the faint and languidrecreation of men whom the fierceness of modern life has fatigued.This press is not the yellow press at all; it is the drab press.Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired clerkany observation more witty than the tired clerk might be ableto address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth. It must not expose anybody(anybody who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody,it must not even please anybody, too much. A general vague ideathat in spite of all this, our yellow press is sensational,arises from such external accidents as large type or lurid headlines.It is quite true that these editors print everything they possiblycan in large capital letters. But they do this, not because itis startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly wearyor partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification anda comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner.The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers,for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses usea similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell.The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoein order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to putthe child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident.Of the same character is the dim and quiet dame school whichSir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep. All their sentimentsare spelling-book sentiments--that is to say, they are sentimentswith which the pupil is already respectfully familiar.All their wildest posters are leaves torn from a copy-book.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France,in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country.When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill,he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leadingIrish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police systemwith a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalistdesires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say,that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives.Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this;their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same.But it is their mental calibre which happens to be suchthat they can only invent calm and even reassuring things.The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekinwas mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those whohad private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connectedwith any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation.It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressiveexcept a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which Ihappen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral.But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage.For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinelyto surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump,you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you.But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage;their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis,the things which everybody else says casually, and without rememberingwhat they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything,they never reach the point of attacking anything which is largeand real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attackthe army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland,or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago.They attack something like the War Office--something, that is,which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend,something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers.just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining itto shout, so they show the hopelessly unsensational natureof their minds when they really try to be sensational.With the whole world full of big and dubious institutions,with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face,their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the War Office.They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or forma secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor is itonly from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensationalsuch as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words ofCowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me."The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism.This has been discovered by that very able and honest journalist,Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against Christianity,warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his paper, but whocontinued from an honourable sense of intellectual responsibility.He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly shockedhis readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper.It was bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wantedto read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him,and wanted to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped,I am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generallyinserted with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered(like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if aneditor can only make people angry enough, they will write halfhis newspaper for him for nothing.

Some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the properobjects of so serious a consideration; but that can scarcelybe maintained from a political or ethical point of view.In this problem of the mildness and tameness of the Harmsworth mindthere is mirrored the outlines of a much larger problem which isakin to it.

The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of successand violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity.But he is not alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merelybecause he happens personally to be stupid. Every man, however brave,who begins by worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity.Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must endin mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved,not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view.It is not the folly of the man which brings about thisnecessary fall; it is his wisdom. The worship of success isthe only one out of all possible worships of which this is true,that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves and cowards.A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's ciphers or forthe sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success.For obviously a man may choose to fail because he lovesMrs. Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to failbecause he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's testof everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all.As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flatteryor platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hopebegins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues,it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all thesemodern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence.They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was toadmire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo.They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong.They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to bestrong must despise the strong. They sought to be everything,to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energythat would drive the stars. But they did not realize the twogreat facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the firstand most difficult step is to be something; second, that the momenta man is something, he is essentially defying everything.The lower animals, say the men of science, fought their way upwith a blind selfishness. If this be so, the only real moral of itis that our unselfishness, if it is to triumph, must be equally blind.The mammoth did not put his head on one side and wonder whethermammoths were a little out of date. Mammoths were at leastas much up to date as that individual mammoth could make them.The great elk did not say, "Cloven hoofs are very much worn now."He polished his own weapons for his own use. But in the reasoninganimal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may failthrough perceiving his own failure. When modern sociologists talkof the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time,they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirelyof people who will not accommodate themselves to anything.At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creaturesall accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.And that is becoming more and more the situation of modern England.Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion,public opinion minus his opinion. Every man makes hiscontribution negative under the erroneous impression thatthe next man's contribution is positive. Every man surrendershis fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender.And over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this newand wearisome and platitudinous press, incapable of invention,incapable of audacity, capable only of a servility all the morecontemptible because it is not even a servility to the strong.But all who begin with force and conquest will end in this.

The chief characteristic of the "New journalism" is simply that itis bad journalism. It is beyond all comparison the most shapeless,careless, and colourless work done in our day.

I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of goldand adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of Empire.I found it (as the reader has already eagerly guessed) in Pearson'sMagazine, while I was communing (soul to soul) with Mr. C. Arthur Pearson,whose first and suppressed name I am afraid is Chilperic.It occurred in an article on the American Presidential Election.This is the sentence, and every one should read it carefully,and roll it on the tongue, till all the honey be tasted.

"A little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of American working-men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential Election."

I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment;the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.But just think for a moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable mind,of the man who wrote that, of the editor who approved it,of the people who are probably impressed by it, of the incredibleAmerican working-man, of whom, for all I know, it may be true.Think what their notion of "common sense" must be! It is delightfulto realize that you and I are now able to win thousands of votesshould we ever be engaged in a Presidential Election, by doing somethingof this kind. For I suppose the nails and the board are not essentialto the exhibition of "common sense;" there may be variations.We may read--

"A little common sense impresses American working-men more than high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he made his points, pulled buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of votes for his side." Or, "Sound common sense tells better in America than high-flown argument. Thus Senator Budge, who threw his false teeth in the air every time he made an epigram, won the solid approval of American working-men." Or again, "The sound common sense of a gentleman from Earlswood, who stuck straws in his hair during the progress of his speech, assured the victory of Mr. Roosevelt."

There are many other elements in this article on which I shouldlove to linger. But the matter which I wish to point out is thatin that sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth of whatour Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, Empire-builders, and strong,silent men, really mean by "commonsense." They mean knocking,with deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bitsof iron into a useless bit of wood. A man goes on to an Americanplatform and behaves like a mountebank fool with a board anda hammer; well, I do not blame him; I might even admire him.He may be a dashing and quite decent strategist. He may be a fineromantic actor, like Burke flinging the dagger on the floor.He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic, profoundly impressedwith the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the Carpenter,and offering to the people a parable in the form of a ceremony.All I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion inwhich such wild ritualism can be called "sound common sense."And it is in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone,that the new Imperialism lives and moves and has its being.The whole glory and greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this:that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hitsit to or what it does. They care about the noise of the hammer, not aboutthe silent drip of the nail. Before and throughout the African war,Mr. Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.But when we ask, "But what have these nails held together?Where is your carpentry? Where are your contented Outlanders?Where is your free South Africa? Where is your British prestige?What have your nails done?" then what answer is there?We must go back (with an affectionate sigh) to our Pearsonfor the answer to the question of what the nails have done:"The speaker who hammered nails into a board won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the newjournalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which hasjust purchased the Standard. To take one instance out of hundreds,the incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson'sarticle as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "Lie number one.Nailed to the Mast! Nailed to the Mast!" In the whole office therewas apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that wespeak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast.Nobody in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was fallinginto a stale Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick.This is the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard.It is not merely that journalism is victorious over literature.It is that bad journalism is victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is beingousted by another kind of article which we consider common or unclean.It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to a better.If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that Pearson'sMagazine is poor and weak popular journalism. You will know itas certainly as you know bad butter. You will know as certainlythat it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand,in the great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism.Mr. Pearson has been a monument of this enormous banality.About everything he says and does there is something infinitelyweak-minded. He clamours for home trades and employs foreignones to print his paper. When this glaring fact is pointed out,he does not say that the thing was an oversight, like a sane man.He cuts it off with scissors, like a child of three. His very cunningis infantile. And like a child of three, he does not cut it quite off.In all human records I doubt if there is such an example of a profoundsimplicity in deception. This is the sort of intelligence which nowsits in the seat of the sane and honourable old Tory journalism.If it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of theYankee press, it would be vulgar, but still tropical. But it is not.We are delivered over to the bramble, and from the meanest ofthe shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endurethat journalists of this order represent public opinion.It may be doubted whether any honest and serious Tariff Reformerwould for a moment maintain that there was any majorityfor Tariff Reform in the country comparable to the ludicrouspreponderance which money has given it among the great dailies.The only inference is that for purposes of real public opinionthe press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy. Doubtless thepublic buys the wares of these men, for one reason or another.But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admirestheir politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophyof Mr. Crosse or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell.If these men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say exceptthat there are plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road,and many much better. But if they make any sort of attemptto be politicians, we can only point out to them that they are notas yet even good journalists.

Chesterton, Heretics, 7

Omar and the Sacred Vine

A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connectionwith the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matterrange from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the ladywho smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions itis almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position isto say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine.With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity.The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drinkit as a medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in orderto obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional,something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which,unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hourof the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health,he is trying to get something natural; something, that is,that he ought not to be without; something that he may find itdifficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may notbe seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is moredazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary.If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man,and said, "This will enable you to jump off the Monument,"doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jumpoff the Monument all day long to the delight of the City.But if we took it to a blind man, saying, "This will enable you to see,"he would be under a heavier temptation. It would be hard for himnot to rub it on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a noblehorse or the birds singing at daybreak. It is easy to deny one'sself festivity; it is difficult to deny one's self normality.Hence comes the fact which every doctor knows, that it is oftenperilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it.I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the givingof alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable.But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the properuse of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many othersound rules--a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never becauseyou are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it,or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum;but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be likethe laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it,for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell.But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking,and the ancient health of the world.

For more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a greatEastern figure has lain upon our English literature.Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam concentrated into animmortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time.Of the literary splendour of that work it would be merely banal to speak;in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combiningthe gay pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness of a song.But of its philosophical, ethical, and religious influence which hasbeen almost as great as its brilliancy, I should like to say a word,and that word, I confess, one of uncompromising hostility.There are a great many things which might be said againstthe spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious influence.But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the rest--a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us. This is the terribleblow that this great poem has struck against sociability and the joyof life. Some one called Omar "the sad, glad old Persian."Sad he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever.He has been a worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.

A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-treewith his wine-pot and his scroll of poems. It may seem strangethat any one's thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him,fly back to the dark bedside where the doctor doles out brandy.It may seem stranger still that they should go backto the grey wastrel shaking with gin in Houndsditch.But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil bond.Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing.It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. Itis the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy.His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that reveals it.It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and instinctive;it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an investment,as unsavoury as a dose of camomile. Whole heavens above it,from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style,rises the splendour of some old English drinking-song--

"Then pass the bowl, my comrades all, And let the zider vlow."
For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worthof truly worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the briefand kindly leisure of the poor. Of course, the great part ofthe more stolid reproaches directed against the Omarite moralityare as false and babyish as such reproaches usually are. One critic,whose work I have read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omaran atheist and a materialist. It is almost impossible for an Orientalto be either; the East understands metaphysics too well for that.Of course, the real objection which a philosophical Christianwould bring against the religion of Omar, is not that he givesno place to God, it is that he gives too much place to God.His is that terrible theism which can imagine nothing else but deity,and which denies altogether the outlines of human personalityand human will.

"The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes, But Here or There as strikes the Player goes; And He that tossed you down into the field, He knows about it all--he knows--he knows."
A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to thisbecause it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the soul.The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism isnot in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God;it is that it denies the existence of man.

In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyatstands first in our time; but it does not stand alone.Many of the most brilliant intellects of our time have urgedus to the same self-conscious snatching at a rare delight.Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death,and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simplyfor those moments' sake. The same lesson was taught by thevery powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde.It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion isnot the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people.Great joy does, not gather the rosebuds while it may;its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendourof youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in.In all great comic literature, in "Tristram Shandy"or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility;we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chieflyin certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should thinkof them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake."To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure.I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I meansomething with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness.A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love,or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment,but precisely not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for thewoman's sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but notfor the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag.The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting;the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinksof the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as somethingthat cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity;these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they becomeas cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things.He can only love immortal things for an instant.

Pater's mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase.He asks us to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Flames are neverhard and never gem-like--they cannot be handled or arranged.So human emotions are never hard and never gem-like; they arealways dangerous, like flames, to touch or even to examine.There is only one way in which our passions can become hardand gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold as gems.No blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and laughterof men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes.For any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required;a certain shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certainboyish expectation. Purity and simplicity are essential to passions--yes even to evil passions. Even vice demands a sort of virginity.

Omar's (or Fitzgerald's) effect upon the other world we may let go,his hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing.The Puritans, as I have said, are far jollier than he.The new ascetics who follow Thoreau or Tolstoy are much livelier company;for, though the surrender of strong drink and such luxuries maystrike us as an idle negation, it may leave a man with innumerablenatural pleasures, and, above all, with man's natural power of happiness.Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without a cup of coffee. If Tolstoycannot admire marriage, at least he is healthy enough to admire mud.Nature can be enjoyed without even the most natural luxuries.A good bush needs no wine. But neither nature nor wine nor anythingelse can be enjoyed if we have the wrong attitude towards happiness,and Omar (or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong attitude towards happiness.He and those he has influenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay,we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things.We cannot enjoy thoroughly even a pas-de-quatre at a subscription danceunless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune. No one canbe really hilarious but the serious man. "Wine," says the Scripture,"maketh glad the heart of man," but only of the man who has a heart.The thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual.Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things.Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion. Once in the world'shistory men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tuneof their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since.With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat hasquite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety.He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his churchwas grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman.Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feastsbecause life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad."Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why.Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because thestars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink,because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for.Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and anevil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hand.And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whosehand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink" he says "for the wholeworld is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrathof God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and thisis the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testamentthat is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why.Drink, for I know of when you go and where."

Chesterton, Heretics, 6

Christmas and the Aesthetes

The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimismhave been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good andevil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly fromthe fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil.Hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions."They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but theyappear to many to have collected all that is dull in them.All the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white.Mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and athing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something muchworse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the Thugs.The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is reallythe good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who havethe misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the partscommonly counted good are bad, and the parts commonly countedbad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admireit in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate alltheir whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.This will often happen to us in connection with human religions.Take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energyof the nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophyof Auguste Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army isexpressed in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they doa great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style;their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong."To me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to bethe truth. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Armyare excellent, but I am quite sure their methods are admirable.Their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions;they are popular like all religion, military like all religion,public and sensational like all religion. They are not reverent any morethan Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicatemeaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels.That beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides, in Renan,in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it--you will find only laughter and war. A man cannot pay that kindof reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be reverenttowards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation Army, though their voicehas broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are reallythe old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of Dionysus,wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for a philosophy.Professor Huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called the SalvationArmy "corybantic Christianity." Huxley was the last and noblestof those Stoics who have never understood the Cross. If he hadunderstood Christianity he would have known that there never has been,and never can be, any Christianity that is not corybantic.

And there is this difference between the matter of aims andthe matter of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing likethe Salvation Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritualand atmosphere very easy. No one, perhaps, but a sociologistcan see whether General Booth's housing scheme is right.But any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals togethermust be right. A page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings,anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind.But the thing which is irrational any one can understand.That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far,while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all.History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticismwhich stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people.Common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark templeof culture. And so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists and itsgenuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of the doctors,there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass bands,for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quickenthe internal life. The object of philanthropy is to do good;the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment,amid a crash of brass.

And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--I meanthe religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worshipof humanity. Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliantand chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality,speaks for the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophyof Comte, but not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffsand ceremonials, the new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days.He does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priestsof humanity or let off fireworks because it is Milton's birthday.To the solid English Comtist all this appears, he confesses, to bea little absurd. To me it appears the only sensible part of Comtism.As a philosophy it is unsatisfactory. It is evidently impossible toworship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club;both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong.But we perceive clearly that the Savile Club did not make the starsand does not fill the universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attackthe doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism,and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million personsin one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comtewas wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thoughtof as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible,he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery.He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the thingsthat are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehoodof that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that ritesand forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt.Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and muchwilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things doesnot only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say;it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do.The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples,and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearinggreen carnations and burning other philosophers alive.But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn,and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spreadthe world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy,but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceiveto be the weakness of their master, the English Positivistshave broken the strength of their religion. A man who has faithmust be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictionswhen he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would notread the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever.But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lightinga bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded.There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavilybombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently andbrilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy.Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and againover the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set upa single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety.Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthdayof Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptiveof the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remainsout of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian,when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy.A half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is onlypartially holy. It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thingas leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and giveeach other presents in honour of anything--the birth of MichaelAngelo or the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work.As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material aboutsomething spiritualistic. Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things,and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages.Take away the strange beauty of the saints, and what hasremained to us is the far stranger ugliness of Wandsworth.Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modernworld an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalfof that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do longfor the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter werethe dark ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frameshis steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voiceto forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moorecollects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulnessof the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garmentswho pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.But there is about these people a haunting and alarming somethingwhich suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.It is painful to regard human nature in such a light,but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore doesnot wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.It is even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers.If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plyinga roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.if this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they arethe kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thoughtthe maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimagewould have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the timeof 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 wasfaith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity,wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers. And as creedand mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turnthis gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology.If we ever get the English back on to the English land they will becomeagain a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.The absence from modern life of both the higher and lower forms of faithis largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.

Chesterton, Heretics, 5

Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real partof a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display,but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problemsof human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smallerand smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints;but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites.And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry,cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all,cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd,and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.

There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy.It is always urged against the religious in the past, as a point ofinconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almostcrawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerabletriumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug, that a manshould be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner,and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency betweenthe humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than thereis between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover.The truth is that there are no things for which men will make suchherculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strainedevery nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire.And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he oughtnot to have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendomlies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled.For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soulis suddenly released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane manhow much he merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously.It is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth.But if you ask him what he can conquer--he can conquer the stars.Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product.A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.The mediaeval Europe which asserted humility gained Romance;the civilization which gained Romance has gained the habitable globe.How different the Pagan and Stoical feeling was from this hasbeen admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makesthe great Stoic say--

"'Tis not in mortals to command success; But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."
But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is inevery lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with Europeanadventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success.But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.

And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet readyfor an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that everyone has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious.Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice.Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride.It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goeswith a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity.Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold;pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or pleaseit too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually liesin its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believedin as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world;it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is tooworldly for this world.

The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humilityof the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as wellas a modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believethat a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas,tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars,is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed toindulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose.When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside downin consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it,the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizingof the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelingsof a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of aby-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocenceof the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period,which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph.If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cardstheir plea was not even that they had done it on principle;their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident.Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in whatthey had done, there was a good ground for attacking them;but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious.There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possibleto Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness;one might almost say because of his dulness. This childlikeand prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science.Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is,in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility.They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world,beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talkof the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed,of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English,they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness.They are becoming conscious of their own strength--that is,they are growing weaker. But one purely modern man has emergedin the strictly modern decades who does carry into our world the clearpersonal simplicity of the old world of science. One man of geniuswe have who is an artist, but who was a man of science, and who seemsto be marked above all things with this great scientific humility.I mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his case, as in the others abovespoken of, there must be a great preliminary difficulty in convincingthe ordinary person that such a virtue is predicable of such a man.Mr. Wells began his literary work with violent visions--visions ofthe last pangs of this planet; can it be that a man who beginswith violent visions is humble? He went on to wilder and wilderstories about carving beasts into men and shooting angels like birds.Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into men humble?Since then he has done something bolder than either of these blasphemies;he has prophesied the political future of all men; prophesied itwith aggressive authority and a ringing decision of detail.Is the prophet of the future of all men humble ? It will indeedbe difficult, in the present condition of current thought aboutsuch things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a mancan be humble who does such big things and such bold things.For the only answer is the answer which I gave at the beginningof this essay. It is the humble man who does the big things.It is the humble man who does the bold things. It is the humbleman who has the sensational sights vouchsafed to him, and thisfor three obvious reasons: first, that he strains his eyes morethan any other men to see them; second, that he is more overwhelmedand uplifted with them when they come; third, that he recordsthem more exactly and sincerely and with less adulterationfrom his more commonplace and more conceited everyday self.Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that is,most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense adventuresare to the unadventurous.

Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be,like a great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult toillustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it,I should have no difficulty about which example to begin with.The most interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he isthe only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has notstopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow.Of this growth the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradualchange of opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions.It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another likethat of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance alonga quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chiefproof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the factthat it has been upon the whole in advance from more startlingopinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sensean advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions.This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur.Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classeswould be so much differentiated in the future that one class wouldeat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had oncefound arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted itexcept for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted itin favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimatelysubordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class,a class of engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory withthe same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it.Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true.He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man cancome to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can standon a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twicetwo is four.

Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progressof conservativism. He is finding out more and more that conventions,though silent, are alive. As good an example as any of thishumility and sanity of his may be found in his change of viewon the subject of science and marriage. He once held, I believe,the opinion which some singular sociologists still hold,that human creatures could successfully be paired and bred afterthe manner of dogs or horses. He no longer holds that view.Not only does he no longer hold that view, but he has written about itin "Mankind in the Making" with such smashing sense and humour, that Ifind it difficult to believe that anybody else can hold it either.It is true that his chief objection to the proposal is that it isphysically impossible, which seems to me a very slight objection,and almost negligible compared with the others. The one objectionto scientific marriage which is worthy of final attention is simplythat such a thing could only be imposed on unthinkable slavesand cowards. I do not know whether the scientific marriage-mongersare right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says) in sayingthat medical supervision would produce strong and healthy men.I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strongand healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.

The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that itconnects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has healthto do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In specialand abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarlyunhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy.But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless.If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men,and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologistswe are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity.And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself.For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphaticallyto be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphaticallyought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution.A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy,and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man oughtto take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foilsor horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake.And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love,and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated.The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinkingabout his tissues. The exercise will really get him into trainingso long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage willreally stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generationif it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement.It is the first law of health that our necessities should not beaccepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries.Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratchor a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care.But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about theimportant things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our verylife will fail.

Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrowerscientific outlook to see that there are some things which actuallyought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected withthe great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning notwith the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about,but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last.The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he doesnot sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men.In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point ofthe Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begunwith the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he wouldhave found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in.He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanentpossibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self,and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. Andthe weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatestdifficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then givean elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.They first assume that no man will want more than his share,and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his sharewill be delivered by motor-car or balloon. And an even strongerexample of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology canbe found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of allpatriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopiamust be a world-state, or else people might make war on it.It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it werea world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world.For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion whatsense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government?The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to preventa thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for.It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations,because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals.If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there wouldonly be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tendto union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation.You can often get men to fight for the union; but you cannever prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation.This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism,the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization.It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhatdeeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining mannerin the introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in somesense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself.At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliableideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction.It will be both clearer, however, and more amusing to quoteMr. Wells himself.

He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain(except the mind of a pedant). . . . Being indeed!--there is no being,but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his backon truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals."Mr. Wells says, again, "There is no abiding thing in what we know.We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerfullight pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and revealsfresh and different opacities below." Now, when Mr. Wellssays things like this, I speak with all respect when I saythat he does not observe an evident mental distinction.It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know.For if that were so we should not know it all and should not callit knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from thatof somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot beentirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference.Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxesthat sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the factof two things being different implies that they are similar.The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness,but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest harecannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness.When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves.And when we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without needof other words, that there are things that do not move.And even in the act of saying that things change, we say that thereis something unchangeable.

But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells's fallacy can befound in the example which he himself chooses. It is quite truethat we see a dim light which, compared with a darker thing,is light, but which, compared with a stronger light, is darkness.But the quality of light remains the same thing, or else weshould not call it a stronger light or recognize it as such.If the character of light were not fixed in the mind, we should bequite as likely to call a denser shadow a stronger light, or viceversa If the character of light became even for an instant unfixed,if it became even by a hair's-breadth doubtful, if, for example,there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of blueness,then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new lighthas more light or less. In brief, the progress may be as varyingas a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road.North and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouthand South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any doubt of the positionof the North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether Iam South of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may bepractically unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light.We may not be able to get to the North Pole. But because the NorthPole is unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable.And it is only because the North Pole is not indefinable that wecan make a satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.

In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back onMr. H. G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals.It is precisely here that Plato shows his sense. It is not truethat everything changes; the things that change are all the manifestand material things. There is something that does not change;and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea.Mr. Wells says truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in oneconnection as dark we may see in another connection as light.But the thing common to both incidents is the mere idea of light--which we have not seen at all. Mr. Wells might grow taller and tallerfor unending aeons till his head was higher than the loneliest star.I can imagine his writing a good novel about it. In that casehe would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things;he would see the clouds first as high and then as low.But there would remain with him through the ages in that starryloneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful spacesfor companion and comfort the definite conception that he was growingtaller and not (for instance) growing fatter.

And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has writtena very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees;and that here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of thisvague relativism. "The Food of the Gods" is, like Mr. BernardShaw's play, in essence a study of the Superman idea. And it lies,I think, even through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory,open to the same intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to haveany regard for a great creature if he does not in any manner conformto our standards. For unless he passes our standard of greatnesswe cannot even call him great. Nietszche summed up all that isinteresting in the Superman idea when he said, "Man is a thingwhich has to be surpassed." But the very word "surpass" impliesthe existence of a standard common to us and the thing surpassing us.If the Superman is more manly than men are, of course they willultimately deify him, even if they happen to kill him first.But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite indifferentto him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity.He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us.Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will nevermake men think a man their superior. Giants, as in the wise oldfairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer"told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think,been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that thepsychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubtthat the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman.It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial personwho wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force.If (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads,he would point out the elementary maxim which declares themto be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernityof such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subjectfrom two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude.But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards,of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience,of the single head and the single heart and the single eye.Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant wasa particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whetherhe was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us.What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politicsand the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children--or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense ? To use a finephrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place?Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out.The old and correct story of Jack the Giant-Killer is simply the wholestory of man; if it were understood we should need no Bibles or histories.But the modern world in particular does not seem to understand it at all.The modern world, like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants;the safest place, and therefore the meanest and the most prosaic.The modern world, when it praises its little Caesars,talks of being strong and brave: but it does not seem to seethe eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas.The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave;and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,in time of doubt, to be strong. The only way in which a giant couldreally keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack wouldbe by continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself.That is by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack.Thus that sympathy with the small or the defeated as such,with which we Liberals and Nationalists have been often reproached,is not a useless sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and hisfriends fancy. It is the first law of practical courage.To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good thanthe advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons.If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him;but in that case, why not call him the Saint? But if he ismerely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger,I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with usat least for all the strength we have. It we are weaker than he,that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves.If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that isno reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own.But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-worshipand celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the Superman.That he may be something more than man, we must be something less.

Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this.But the old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more humanthan humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless.Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughtersarmies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar saysin his desolate pride, "He who has never hoped can never despair."The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever sorrowlike unto my sorrow?" A great man is not a man so strong that he feelsless than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.And when Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, `be hard,'"he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, `be dead.'"Sensibility is the definition of life.

I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelton this matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it isspecially prominent in his mind; I know that the Superman doesnot bulk so large in his cosmos as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw.I have dwelt on it for the opposite reason; because this heresyof immoral hero-worship has taken, I think, a slighter hold of him,and may perhaps still be prevented from perverting one ofthe best thinkers of the day. In the course of "The New Utopia"Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley.That clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence,and was always going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads,to strong and primitive literatures, to find the praise of strengthand the justification of tyranny. But he could not find it.It is not there. The primitive literature is shown in the tale of Jackthe Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all in praise of the weak.The rude old tales are as tender to minorities as any modernpolitical idealist. The rude old ballads are as sentimentallyconcerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection Society.When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks andhard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had onlytwo kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak hadconquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had,for once in a way, conquered the weak. For this defiance ofthe statu quo, this constant effort to alter the existing balance,this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature andinmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man.It is his strength to disdain strength. The forlorn hopeis not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men are admired most whenthey defy, not only the king, but what is more to the point, the hero.The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman, that momentthe chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinkerwhom he thought to thrust aside. And the chivalrous chroniclermakes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration.This magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism;it is not a product of anything to do with peace.This magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war.The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting England, and they goback to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and fighting English.And the thing that they find written across that fierce oldliterature everywhere, is "the policy of Majuba."