Title:      THE EVERLASTING MAN (1925)
Author:     G.K. Chesterton



Prefatory Note
Introduction: The Plan of This Book

PART I:  ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

    I The Man in the Cave
   II Professors and Prehistoric Men
  III The Antiquity of Civilisation
   IV God and Comparative Religion
    V Man and Mythologies
   VI Demons and Philosophers
  VII The War of the Gods and Demons
 VIII The End of the World

PART II:  ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

    I The God in the Cave
   II The Riddles of the Gospel
  III The Strangest Story in the World
   IV The Witness of the Heretics
    V The Escape from Paganism
   VI The Five Deaths of the Faith

CONCLUSION:  THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK

Appendix I.  On Prehistoric Man
Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy


* * *

PREPATORY NOTE

This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood
The view suggested is historical rather than theological,
and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been
the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already
writing a more purely controversial volume.  It is impossible,
I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject,
above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic;
but this study is not specially concerned with the differences
between a Catholic and a Protestant.  Much of it is devoted
to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians;
and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side
by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side
with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula
contradicted by a very striking fact.  To suggest this I
have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all;
I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things,
as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned.
As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view
of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate
him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried
through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work;
but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur
to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

* * *

INTRODUCTION

THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back
to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story
I once wrote.  It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic
to another story that I never wrote.  Like every book I
never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use
it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth.
I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides,
like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are
scrawled along the flanks of the hills.  It concerned some boy whose
farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels
to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant;
and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that
his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side
like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts
of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived,
but which was too large and too close to be seen.  That, I think,
is a true picture of the progress of any really independent
intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best
thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really
outside it.  And a particular point of it is that the popular
critics of Christianity are not really outside it.
They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term.
They are doubtful in their very doubts.  Their criticism has
taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling.
Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk.
They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we
should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared
us were plain clothes detectives.  Or they will complain that a
sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle;
though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle.
It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it
would be much truer of journalist.  The clergyman appears
in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church;
the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him.
They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press
about why the churches are empty, without even going there
to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.
Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most
insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him
after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; 'Your mind
is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.'  So we may truly
say to the very feeblest cleric:  'Your mind is not so blank
as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street,
or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have
not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves.
Let alone of what you ought to give them.'  They will suddenly
turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented
the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent;
and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent,
except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan
sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church.  It was
the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying
the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was,
or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent
of universal war.  As for the general view that the Church
was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark
was discredited by the Flood.  When the world goes wrong,
it proves rather that the Church is right.  The Church is justified,
not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they
are in a state of reaction against it.  It is well with the boy
when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when
he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole.
But these people have got into an intermediate state,
have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can
see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind.
They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy.
They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being
Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere
of a reaction:  sulks, perversity, petty criticism.
They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost
the light of the faith.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to
love it.  But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.
It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge
of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be
something more like a Confucian.  The worst judge of all is the man
now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian
turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in
the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning,
blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what,
and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.
He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would;
he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism.  He cannot
by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles
away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially
as a Chinese pagoda.  It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier,
who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there
as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because
his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of
representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes
of Chinamen.  But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen,
and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as
featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts;
or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys.
It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult;
the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses
of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks
twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession;
to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel
and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.  Then at least we
should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics
seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits.
Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere
of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape.
Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing
as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet.
It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes
than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops.
It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda
than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either
to go inside and help or to go outside and forget.
For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession,
I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving
the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen.  In other words, I recommend
these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints
as if they were Pagan sages.

But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try
to show in these pages that when we do make this imaginative
effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it
really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside.
It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant
that he sees that he really is a giant.  It is exactly when we
do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear
and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church
of Christ.  To put it shortly, the moment we are really
impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it.
But this second proposition requires more serious discussion;
and I shall here set myself to discuss it.

As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something
solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story,
it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet
solid character in the human story that had led up to it;
because that human story also had a root that was divine.
I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable
when it is fairly compared with the common religious life
of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable
when we compare it with the common life of nature.
And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something
like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals
to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens
to Christians.  Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit
of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be.
It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see
this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry
light that they cannot see the difference between black and white.
It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt
that they have a motive for making out that all the white
is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted.
I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not
say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not
in any way scientific.  An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast
may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial.
And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher
critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative
religion are in the least impartial.  Why should they be impartial,
what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about
whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?
I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final
act of faith fixes a man's mind because it satisfies his mind.
But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are;
in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some
sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot.
I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed
to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope
of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate
as they have with the Society of Jesus.  They are not impartial;
they never by any chance hold the historical scales even;
and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution
and transition.  They suggest everywhere the grey gradations
of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods.
I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods,
it is not the daylight of men.

I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two
things look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only
in the false twilight of an imaginary period of transition
that they can be made to look in the least like anything else.
The first of these is the creature called man and the second
is the man called Christ.  I have therefore divided this
book into two parts:  the former being a sketch of the main
adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen;
and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it
becoming Christian.  Both motives necessitate a certain method,
a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less
easy to define or defend.

In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note
of impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty.
I mean that in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first.
That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very
little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church.  But the Church,
being a highly practical thing for working and fighting,
is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children.
There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition,
of familiarity, and even of routine.  So long as its fundamentals
are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition.
But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must
try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt
realism and objectivity of innocence.  Or if we cannot do that,
we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom
and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection
had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.
For in connection with things so great as are here considered,
whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake.
Indeed contempt must be an illusion.  We must invoke the most wild
and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see
what is there.

The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something,
indeed of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful
or wonderful.  George Wyndham once told me that he had seen
one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it
was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing
a man to ride on him.  Somebody else has said that a fine man
on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world.
Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well.
The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people
with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right
relation to horses.  A boy who remembers his father who rode
a horse, who rode it well and treated it well, will know
that the relation can be satisfactory and will be satisfied.
He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses
because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will
see nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse.
He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains
to him that the horse ought to be riding on the man.
He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men
must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods.
And horse and man together making an image that is to him
human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift
horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical;
like a vision of St. George in the clouds.  The fable
of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him:
and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero
in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky.
For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the
wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak 'chivalry.'
The very name of the horse has been given to the highest
mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that
the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.

But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this
sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end.
We must now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood,
in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody
sitting on a chair.  The wonder of which Wyndham spoke,
the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue,
the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become
to him merely a convention and a bore.  Perhaps they have been
merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion;
perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in
the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses
without the horrible risk of being horsy.  Anyhow, he has got
into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than for a
towel-horse. His grandfather's charge at Balaclava seems to him
as dull and dusty as the album containing such family portraits.
Such a person has not really become enlightened about the album;
on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust.
But when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will
not be able to look at a horse or a horseman at all until
he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar
and almost unearthly.

Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there
must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions,
one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures.
We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck
not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle
is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest
of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard
in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn,
alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is
to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof.
Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster;
for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique.
But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him,
we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant
when the first man rode him.  In such a dream he may seem ugly,
but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged
dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive.
By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same
marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible,
even more marvellous.  We shall have again a glimpse of St. George;
the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse,
but rather riding on the dragon.

In this example, which I have taken merely because it is
an example, it will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare
seen by the first man of the forest is either more true
or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen
by the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal.
Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional grasp
of truth is the better.  But I say that the truth is found at one
or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate
condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition.
In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster
than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we
have got into that state of mind about a horse as something stale,
it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is
a good deal too fresh.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so
it is with the monster that is called a man.
Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always
to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy.
He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will
feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view,
and will be satisfied.  But if he has lost the pose to strike
wherever possible this note of what is new and strange,
and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject
may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful.
I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside
in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background
of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity
as a whole against the background of natural things.
And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand
out from their background like supernatural things.
They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism;
they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid
as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold.
So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature,
or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.

But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole.
We have to see how they developed as well as how they began;
for the most incredible part of the story is that
things which began thus should have developed thus.
Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine
that other things might have happened or other entities evolved.
Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort
of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must
face an exception and a prodigy.  If there was ever a moment
when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy
picture of his career transferred to some other animal.
An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants
built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets
like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus.
A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed
a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers.
We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman,
a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and
cooking and carpentering with his feet.  But if we are considering
what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced
everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces
and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light.
And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church
amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling
and killing each other at the end of the Empire, while we can
if we choose imagine the Church killed in the struggle and some
other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more surprised
(and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards
rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought
and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance;
and still as new as it is old.

* * *

PART I

On the Creature Called Man


* * *

I

THE MAN IN THE CAVE

Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote,
there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover.
At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most
astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered it;
though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time.
It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants
and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science.
That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of
the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning
with an account of the astronomical universe.  I should try to see
even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence
of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort
to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator.
Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity.
I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed
to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle
vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size.
And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange
planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other
trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant.
I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet
at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place;
and a very extraordinary place too.  That is the note which I wish
to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some
more familiar fashion.

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures,
concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book
about the Evolution of the Idea of God.  I happened to remark
that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book
about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen.  And I remember
that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it
was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little.
For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him
to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous;
for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how
this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.'
My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose
even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations.
In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is
something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence.
The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book
the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end;
whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning
and gave him a sort of shock.  I have noticed that if you put
a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog,
these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots.
Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does
not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations
of the too subtle theologians.  But so long as you begin with
a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past;
very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title,
for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

But this little incident has always lingered in my mind
as a sort of parable.  Most modern histories of mankind begin
with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition
of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case.
There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and
even about the idea.  As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these
primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea.
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.
Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something
could turn into something else.  It is really far more logical
to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'
even if you only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power
began some unthinkable process.'  For God is by its nature a name
of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine
how a world was created any more than he could create one.
But evolution really is mistaken for explanation.
It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression
that they do understand it and everything else; just as many
of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read
the Origin of Species.

But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent
of a slope, is a great part of the illusion.  It is an illogicality
as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with
the question.  An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible
or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves.
For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle
would be just as incredible as a swift one.  The Greek witch
may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand.
But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking
a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four
trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing.
It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.  The medieval
wizard may have flown through the air from the top of a tower;
but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely
and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation.
Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment
of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty
is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere
delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things.
There will be something to be said upon particular
examples elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere
of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going slow;
the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman
travelling for the first time in a motor-car.

Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter
he was a prophet at his own expense.  It is curious that his first
fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history.
The Time Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions
founded on the mere relativity of time.  In that sublime nightmare
the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation
spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot
across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor.
Yet in his sense these things were quite as natural when they
went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as supernatural
when they go slowly.  The ultimate question is why they go at all;
and anybody who really understands that question will know
that it always has been and always will be a religious question;
or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question.
And most certainly he will not think the question answered
by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change; or, in other
words by a merely relative question of the same story being spun
out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story
at a cinema by turning a handle.

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive
existence is something more like a primitive spirit.
In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask
the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity.
And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of
clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.
For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle
of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing
and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could
contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair.
What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the
trees and the grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary
things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support themselves
in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic shapes;
that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a load
of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four legs,
and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two.
These are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution
and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories.
The matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it
need only be noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery
still attaches to the two great transitions:  the origin of the
universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself.
Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery
attaches to the origin of man himself.  In other words, a third
bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there
came into the world what we call reason and what we call will.
Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds
and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact.
But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing
on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic
and subversive than if he were standing on his head.

I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man.
It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness
is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world.
It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular
science and journalistic jargon have confused the facts about the
first things, so that we cannot see which of them really comes first.
It illustrates, though only in one convenient illustration,
all that I mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp differences
that give its shape to history, instead of being submerged
in all these generalisations about slowness and sameness.
For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's phrase, an outline of history.
But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this
evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline.
But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we
really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with
numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He
seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character
but as a private character.  His psychology is seriously taken
into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine.
So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was
knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is,
I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.'
I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea;
and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric
divorce-reports it is founded.  Nor, as I have explained elsewhere,
have I ever been able to see the probability of it,
even considered a priori.  We are always told without any
explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club
and knocked the woman down before he carried her off.
But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid
modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist
on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off.
And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male
was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined.
The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason
why he should have been more brutal than the brutes.
And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami
are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy.
The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear;
but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained
with any such bias for spinsterhood.  In short these details
of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either
the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I
should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I
have never been able to find it.  But the curious thing is this:
that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific
or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this
unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one
connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk
about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected.
People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they
have never even looked at their own term for what could really
be learned from it.

In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man
except what he did in the cave.  Now there does happen to be some
real evidence of what he did in the cave.  It is little enough,
like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real
cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club.
And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite
simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it.
What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory
club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head.
The cave was not a Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons
of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged
in rows and all cracked like eggs.  It was something quite unconnected,
one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical
implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question
for us.  And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic glimpse
of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive even
the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of morning.
It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found as
simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the Gardens
of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of controversial
theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of such a dawn.
The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a tall
story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own
shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards.
It would be well if modern investigators could describe their
discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest travellers,
and without any of these long allusive words that are full of irrelevant
implication and suggestion.  Then we might realise exactly what we
do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.

A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills
and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into
a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock.
They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable,
they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles,
they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying
themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection.
This is but the commonplace of all such courageous exploration;
but what is needed here is some one who shall put such stories
in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace.
There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic
in the accident that the first intruders into that sunken
world were a priest and a boy, the types of the antiquity
and of youth of the world.  But here I am even more concerned
with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the priest.
Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might
be to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots
of all the trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach
what William Morris called the very roots of the mountains.
Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that
is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to its end,
not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some
dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what
he could see.  What he did see at last was a cavern so far
from the light of day that it might have been the legendary
Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea.
This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its
long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large
and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths;
and when they followed the lines of them they recognised,
across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture
of a man's hand.  They were drawings or paintings of animals;
and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist.
Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of
the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has
ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no
artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist.
They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist,
the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things;
as where the draughtsman had represented the action
of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses
towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse.
But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves
something of a task in rendering it truly.  In this and twenty
other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals
with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure.
In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist
but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing
whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak
and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds,
that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning
the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted
at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite
human and even humane.  It is certainly not the ideal of an
inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science.
When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts
talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with
anything that is really in the cave.  When the realist of the sex
novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain;
he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's
readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went
off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.
When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts
of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,'
he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make
conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze.
Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and
innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence
that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.  In other words
the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather
a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth.
The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion
and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence
and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy.
If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad
without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we
know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless
and pleasing pictures on a wall.

But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular
moral here to be drawn from them.  That moral is something
much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it
is first stated it will sound childish.  And indeed it is
in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this
apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child.
It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy
in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen.
If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed
that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense;
that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition.
In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's work
as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible
in being primitive.  He would see what was there to see;
and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there,
by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation.
If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course,
that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible
with the facts that were true.  The artist may have had another
side to his character besides that which he has alone left on
record in his works of art.  The primitive man may have taken
a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals;
all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not
the other.  It may be true that when the cave-man's finished
jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be,
he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to
watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook.
These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant.
The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning
from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures
in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are.
So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified
in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and
red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit
of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk.
The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse;
because it was fun.  The man had drawn a stag with his head
turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut;
because it was difficult.  The child and the man,
being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men;
and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges
the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.
But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man
of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen.
If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by
St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals,
there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave
was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe,
and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them;
very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern
infant school.  And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention
to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily.
The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves,
any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after
that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove
that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground.
The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might
have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place
of a secret society or all sorts of things.  But it is quite true
that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a
nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear.
I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy
to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making
a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall.
In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later,
of another cavern and another child.

But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor,
by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts
to a mere evolutionary variation.  Suppose the boy saw himself,
with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running
with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest
save by a relative and recent variation.  What would be for him
the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all,
it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found
the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer.
But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a
reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.  That sounds like a truism,
but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth.
He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken
continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in
the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon;
he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone,
traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost
dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive
creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one.
He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in
directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird;
groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant
elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest
of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger.
But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant
line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch
the faint suggestion of a form.  To all appearance, the thing
would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations
of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before
our eyes The child would no more expect to see it than to see
the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog.
The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from
expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and
recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that.
It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him
should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote.
To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find
any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals.  That is
the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures;
only it is too simple to be learnt.  It is the simple truth that man
does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof
of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most
primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke
to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man.
Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique.
Art is the signature of man.

That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings
ought really to begin.  The evolutionist stands staring in the
painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too
simple to be understood.  He tries to deduce all sorts of other
indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures,
because he can not see the primary significance of the whole;
thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion
or the presence of superstition; about tribal government
and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what.
In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more
detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric
origins of human ideas and especially of the religious idea.
Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a sort of symbol
of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start.
When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer
men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer
man could draw and the reindeer could not.  If the reindeer
man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more
extraordinary that he could do what all other animals could not.
If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any
other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary
that he was not in the least like any other beast or bird.
He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product than
as a supernatural one.

But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave
of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model
of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces.
It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow
and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree.
For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact
not a trace of any such development or degree.  Monkeys did
not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did
not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.
The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits;
the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early
bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist
and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this
notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape
is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we
cannot even talk about it without treating man as something
separate from nature.  In other words, every sane sort of history
must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone.
How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there,
is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists
and not for historians.  But an excellent test case of this
isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art.
This creature was truly different from all other creatures;
because he was a creator as well as a creature.
Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image
but the image of man.  But the truth is so true that,
even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be
assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle.
In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all
the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion;
to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief.
But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is
this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave.
It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in
the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror.
It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection.
It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes
can be seen like shining shadows in a vision.  Above all,
it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind.
Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways;
other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways;
just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round
like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror.
But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all.
Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things;
man is the image of God These are the only real lessons to be
learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.

It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for
all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception
to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things.
But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that
simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry.
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being;
almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.  In all sobriety,
he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien
habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one.
He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage.
He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts.
He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind
of cripple.  He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes;
he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture.
His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations.
Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness
called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in
the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.
Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from
the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the
presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame.
Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them
as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.
This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion,
until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the
Simple Life.  The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.

It is not natural to see man as a natural product.  It is not common
sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore.
It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal.  It is not sane.
It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion
which is the principle of all reality.  It is reached by stretching
a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain
light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower
things which may happen to be similar.  The solid thing standing
in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides,
is quite different.  It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides
we see of it the more extraordinary it seems.  It is emphatically
not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else.
If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could
have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world
sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they
did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that
natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty.
To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something
like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one
swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky.
It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension.
We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe.
It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly
jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings
in a flash and fly.  It would not be a question of the cattle finding
their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds,
not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making
a summer house.  For the very fact that birds do build nests is
one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference.
The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot
get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind;
it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all.
If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the
Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within.
But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud
with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil
like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird
will beat in vain.  But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds
begin to build as men build.  Suppose in an incredibly short space
of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest.
Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves
to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage
and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy
columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging
gardens of Babylon.  Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds
celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest.
Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of
the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning
of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not
regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds;
he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird
of ill-omen, certainly as an omen.  That bird would tell the augurs,
not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened.
That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension
of depth; a mind like that of man.  If there be no God, no other mind
could conceivably have foreseen it.

Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence
that this thing was evolved at all.  There is not a particle
of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it
came naturally.  In a strictly scientific sense, we simply
know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew,
or what it is.  There may be a broken trail of stone and bone
faintly suggesting the development of the human body.
There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development
of this human mind.  It was not and it was; we know not in what
instant or in what infinity of years.  Something happened;
and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.
It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense.
The historian must take it or something like it for granted;
it is not his business as a historian to explain it.
But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain
it as a biologist.  In neither case is there any disgrace to him
in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality,
and history and biology deal with realities.  He is quite
justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow
that jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened.
He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts
man as a fact.  He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and
disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy
and disconnected thing.  For reality is a thing in which we can
all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else.
The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us.
But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have
come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically
to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before
our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature,
then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go.
We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams,
if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster.
We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes
a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn
him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable.
That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten,
with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.  We can accept
man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact.
We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal.
But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed
we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles,
that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven
heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.

* * *

II

PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN

Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that
has hardly been noticed.  The science whose modern marvels
we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data.
In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can
always increase evidence by experiment.  But it cannot experiment
in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make.
An inventor can advance step by step in the construction
of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks
and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot
watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If
he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane
will correct it by crashing to the ground.  But if he has
made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor,
he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree.
He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch
him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry
off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture.
He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds
and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct.
If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get
other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds
a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill,
he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones.
In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished,
he can only go by evidence and not by experiment.
And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential.
Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve,
being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies
off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.
But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be
formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific
mind that it cannot resist talking like this.  It talks about
the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something
like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole
scrapheaps of scraps of metal.  The trouble with the professor
of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap.  The marvellous
and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes.
The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department
it would be truer to talk of the impatience of science.  Owing to the
difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry.
We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be
called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts.
The most empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary.
He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of
increasing it for the future He can only clutch his fragment of fact,
almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint.  And indeed
he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason.
It is his tool and his only tool.  It is his weapon and his only weapon.
He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown
by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience
and even add new facts by experiment.  Sometimes the professor
with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone.
And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that
mankind is going to the dogs--or that it came from them.

For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey
and watching it evolve into a man.  Experimental evidence of such
an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say
(as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution
is likely enough anyhow.  He produces his little bone, or little
collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it.
He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller
than the human.  Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone
and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human.
If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful,
our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful.
But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even
complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits.
He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character.
People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon.
Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles
the First and George the Fourth.  A detailed drawing was reproduced,
carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all
numbered No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face
and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait
of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual
whose influence and character were familiar to us all.
I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white
inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves
by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus.  That the modern
inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe;
but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from
the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones.  Anyhow, those bones
are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole
of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between
man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors.
On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection
which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting
and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains
recording that connection at that point.  The sincerity of Darwin
really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term
as the Missing Link.  But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too
strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen
into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image.
They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link;
as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap
in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with
a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.

In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain
religious and historical problems, I shall waste no further space
on these speculations on the nature of man before he became man.
His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing
of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his
soul as it has shown itself in history.  Unfortunately the same
school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they
come to the first real evidence about the first real men.
Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man,
for the simple reason that he was prehistoric.  The history
of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms.
It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists
are allowed to indulge.  If a parson had casually observed
that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might
be a little chaffed about his logic.  If a bishop were to say
that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd.
But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical
historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric.
The truth is that they are using the terms historic and
prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds.
What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before
the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least
know that humanity was before history.

Human civilisation is older than human records.  That is
the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things.
Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art
of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read.
But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts;
and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations
were civilisations.  The man left a picture of the reindeer,
but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer;
and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history.
But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite
intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt
would be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible.
In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period,
in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.  It does not mean
the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts.
It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we
can read.  This does indeed make all the practical difference
between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible
that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation,
as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism.
And in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten
or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised
and much less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today.
But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity
was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest
doubt and caution.  And unfortunately doubt and caution are
the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism
of current culture.  For that culture is full of curiosity;
and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism.
It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known
and the thing first became impossible.

It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is
simply covered by impudence.  Statements are made so plainly
and positively that men have hardly the moral courage
to pause upon them and find that they are without support.
The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric
tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes.'
Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself
how we should come to know whether clothes had once been
worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few
chips of bone and stone.  It was doubtless hoped that we
should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet.
It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting
pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock.
But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be
immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments,
or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more
traces of them than these people have left.  The plaiting
of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more
and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal.
One civilisation might specialise in things that happened
to be perishable, like weaving and embroidery, and not in things
that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture.
There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies.
A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery
might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no
other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor
and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked--
or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.

It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear
clothes any more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we
have not enough evidence to know whether they did or not.
But it may be worthwhile to look back for a moment at some
of the very few things that we do know and that they did do.
If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them
inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration.
We do not know whether they decorated other things.
We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they
had the embroideries could not be expected to have remained.
But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures
have remained.  And there remains with them, as already suggested,
the testimony to something that is absolute and unique;
that belongs to man and to nothing else except man;
that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree.
A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does
not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection.
A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all;
he does not begin to begin to do it at all.  A line of some kind
is crossed before the first faint line can begin.

Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave
drawings attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period,
said that none of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose;
and he seemed almost to infer that they had no religion.
I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which
reconstructs the very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind from
the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock,
from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know,
acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly
have found it easier to draw reindeer than to draw religion.
He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol.
He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol.
He may have drawn anything except his religious symbol.
He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else;
or it may have been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn.
He may have done or not done half a million things; but in any
case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had no
religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious
symbol that he had no religion.  Now this particular case happens
to illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly.
For a little while afterwards, people discovered not
only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves.
Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed
to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured
to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy;
while the undamaged images were explained in connection
with another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds.
Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific
habit of having it both ways.  If the image is damaged it proves
one superstition and if it is undamaged it proves another.
Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions;
it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters
imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have aimed
at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game.
But in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has
become of the thesis that it had nothing to do with religion?
The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with anything.
It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at
a carved reindeer, for it is shooting them into the air.

Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men
in the modern world also sometimes make marks in caves.
When a crowd of trippers is conducted through the labyrinth
of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has
been observed that hieroglyphics spring into sight where they
have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned refuse
to refer to any remote date.  But the time will come when these
inscriptions will really be of remote date.  And if the professors
of the future are anything like the professors of the present,
they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and interesting
things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century.
If I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen
away from the full-blooded confidence of their fathers,
they will be able to discover the most fascinating facts about us
from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by 'Arry and 'Arriet,
possibly in the form of two intertwined A's. From this alone
they will know (1) That as the letters are rudely chipped with a
blunt pocket knife, the twentieth century possessed no delicate
graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture.
(2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation
never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand.
(3) That because initial consonants stand together in an
unpronounceable fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh
or more probably of the early Semitic type that ignored vowels.
(4) That as the initials of 'Arry and 'Arriet do not in any special
fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed
no religion.  Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth;
for a civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.

It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow
and evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause;
but from a combination that might be called a coincidence.
Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are,
first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists
on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man), second,
the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations
of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing corn.
I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful
psychology to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and
disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and disconnected causes.
Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the future,
were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet
nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love,
for which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland.
I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this
singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of
smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure
of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit.  We could not easily
imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between
the three or any common feeling that could include them all.
Nor could anyone imagine any connection between corn and dreams
and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already a common
feeling to include them all.  But if there was such a common feeling
it could only be the religious feeling; and these things could
not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already.
I think anybody's common sense will tell him that it is far more
likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already;
and that in the light of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could
appear mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.

For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making
things seem distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending
not to understand things that we do understand.
It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth
habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing
strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of eating.
It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age
lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we never heard of walking.
If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us to
the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy.
As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden
us to the wonder of religion, it is irrational rubbish.
It pretends to find some thing incomprehensible in the feelings
that we all comprehend.  Who does not find dreams mysterious,
and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being?
Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing things
of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe?
Who does not understand that there must always be the savour
of something sacred about authority and the solidarity that
is the soul of the tribe?  If there be any anthropologist
who really finds these things remote and impossible to realise,
we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman except that he has
not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man.
To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment
already active could have clothed these separate and diverse things
with sanctity.  To say that religion came from reverencing a chief
or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart
before a really primitive horse.  It is like saying that the impulse
to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures
of reindeers in the cave.  In other words, it is explaining
painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters;
or accounting for art by saying that it arose out of art.
It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry
arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode
being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring;
or that of a young man rising at a regular hour to listen
to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece of paper.
It is quite true that young men often become poets in the spring;
and it is quite true that when once there are poets,
no mortal power can restrain them from writing about
the skylark But the poems did not exist before the poets.
The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms.  In other words,
it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared
for the first time to say it existed already.  Similarly, we
cannot say that religion arose out of the religious forms,
because that is only another way of saying that it only arose
when it existed already.  It needed a certain sort of mind to see
that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead,
as it needed a particular sort of mind to see that there
was any thing poetical about the skylark or the spring.
That mind was presumably what we call the human mind, very much
as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death
and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks.
But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything
short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical
associations at all.  A cow in a field seems to derive no
lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities
for listening to the skylark.  And similarly there is no reason
to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep
as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is
true that in the spring a young quadruped's fancy may lightly
turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever
led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature.
And in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams,
while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that,
we have waited a long time for the dog to develop his
dreams into an elaborate system or religious ceremonial.
We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it;
and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical
construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules
of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason
or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements,
never do pass the line that separates them from creative
expression like art and religion, in any creature except man.
They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance
very improbable that they ever will.  It is not impossible,
in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting
from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old
legend about Christmas Eve.  It is not in that sense impossible
that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up
a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of.
It is not in that sense impossible that they should express
their hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolic dance, in honour
of the cow that jumped over the moon.  It may be that the dog
will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable
him to build a temple to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity.
It may be that his dreams have already begun to turn into
visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about
the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs.  These things
are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically difficult
to prove the universal negative which we call an impossibility.
But all that instinct for the probable, which we call common sense,
must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all
appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least,
we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their
passing from the animal experience to the human experiments.
But spring and death and even dreams, considered merely
as experiences, are their experiences as much as ours.
The only possible conclusion is that these experiences,
considered as experiences, do not generate anything like
a religious sense in any mind except a mind like ours.
We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind that was already
alive and alone.  It was unique and it could make creeds as it
could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain
there for countless ages like the materials for everything else;
but the power of religion was in the mind.  Man could already see
in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he still
sees in them.  He could not only dream but dream about dreams.
He could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death;
and was possessed with that mysterious mystification that forever
finds death incredible.

It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when
he unmistakably appears as man.  We cannot affirm this or anything else
about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes.
But that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation.
We cannot be certain the Pithecanthropus ever worshipped,
because we cannot be certain that he ever lived.
He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact
yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any
other creatures that are certainly apes or other animals.
A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest such an
intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy;
but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish
anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy.
A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything
about religion or about the absence of religion.  If there ever
was any such ape-man, he may have exhibited as much ritual in
religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion as an ape.
He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth.
It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality
appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there
were really any types of the transition to inquire about.
In other words, the missing link might or might not be mystical
if he were not missing.  But compared with the evidence we
have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was
a human being or a half-human being or a being at all.
Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce
any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from him.
Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude
or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men
who were men.  But their own proof only proves that the men
who were already men were already mystics.  They used the rude
and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them.
We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime
too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred
to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.

Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those
who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away.
Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus
lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process.  But in
fact this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience.
They bring together two things that are totally different, the stray
hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block
of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see them
in a single foreshortened line.  But it is an optical illusion.
Men do not in fact stand related to monkeys or missing links
in any such chain as that in which men stand related to men.
There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces
can be found here and there in the huge gap.  Of these beings,
if they ever existed, it may be true that they were things very
unlike men or men very unlike ourselves.  But of prehistoric men,
such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not
true in any sense whatever.  Prehistoric men of that sort were
things exactly like men and men exceedingly like our selves.
They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much,
for the simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles;
but all that we do know about them makes them just as human
and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city.

Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity,
we simply recognise this thing as human.  If we had to recognise
it as animal we should have had to recognise it as abnormal.
If we chose to look through the other end of the telescope,
as I have done more than once in these speculations, if we chose
to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world,
we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad.
But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside,
we know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane.
We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we see it,
in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters.
For instance, all we can infer from primitive legend,
and all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral
and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes.
For clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them
because he is a priest.  It is true that even as an animal he is
here different from the animals.  Nakedness is not nature to him;
it is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense
of his death of cold.  But clothes are worn for dignity or decency
or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth.
It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament
before they are valued for use.  It would almost always appear
that they are felt to have some connection with decorum.
Conventions of this sort vary a great deal with various times and places;
and there are some who cannot get over this reflection, and for whom
it seems a sufficient argument for letting all conventions slide.
They never tire of repeating, with simple wonder, that dress is
different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they cannot
get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair.
They might as well say that because there have been hats of a
good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes,
therefore hats do not matter or do not exist.  They would probably
add that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald.
Men have felt everywhere that certain norms were necessary
to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt
or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms,
whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual respect.
The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely,
to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that
must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race.
The first is the fact that original sin is really original.
Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted
in the origins.  Whatever else men have believed, they have all
believed that there is something the matter with mankind This sense
of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes,
just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.
But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the father
and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and mother;
the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.

That fact is the family.  Here again we must keep the enormous
proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications
and degrees and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds
clinging about a mountain.  It may be that what we call
the family had to fight its way from or through various
anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them
and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them.
As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism,
more formless things could and did lie on the flank of
societies that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing
to show that the form did not exist before the formlessness.
What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness;
and that the material called mankind has taken this form.
For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were recently
mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly
called the couvade.  That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom;
by which the father is treated as if he were the mother.
In any case it clearly involves the mystical sense of sex;
but many have maintained that it is really a symbolic act
by which the father accepts the responsibility of fatherhood.
In that case that grotesque antic is really a very solemn act;
for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know
as human society.  Some groping in these dark beginnings have said
that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under
a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind.
But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy
was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained
fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible.
Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide
what he had created.  So he became the head of the family,
not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather
as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person.
Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been
the first family act, and it would still be true that man then
for the first time acted like a man, and therefore for the first
time became fully a man.  But it might quite as well be true
that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, or whatever we call it,
was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or barbaric
backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric
as they certainly did in historic times.  A symbol like the couvade,
if it was really such a symbol, may have commemorated the
suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion.
We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things,
except in their big results in the building of mankind, but we can
say in what style the bulk of it and the best of it is built.
We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is
the cell that makes up the formation.  Round the family do indeed
gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees.
Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city;
property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag.
In the practical proportions of human history, we come back
to that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child.
It has been said already that if this story cannot start with
religious assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or
metaphysical assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man.
And this is a very good instance of that alternative necessity.
If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity,
we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that
triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world.
For the highest event in history, to which all history looks
forward and leads up, is only something that is at once
the reversal and the renewal of that triangle.  Or rather it
is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other,
making a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than
that of the magicians, the fiends are afraid.  The old Trinity
was of father and mother and child and is called the human family.
The new is of child and mother and father and has the name
of the Holy Family.  It is in no way altered except in being
entirely reversed; just as the world which is transformed was
not in the least different, except in being turned upside-down.

* * *

III

THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been
like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting
to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.
But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great
cities long builded and lost for us in the original night;
colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even
the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size
of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square
and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls
standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world.
The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.  And among other more
important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations
about the previous and unknown period when it was really young.
The two first human societies of which we have any reliable
and detailed record are Babylon and Egypt.  It so happens
that these two vast and splendid achievements of the genius
of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest
and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns.
If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men
and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at
the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.

Of course most of these speculators who are talking
about primitive men are thinking about modern savages.
They prove their progressive evolution by assuming that a great part
of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or even changed
in any way at all.  I do not agree with their theory of change;
nor do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable.
I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid
and recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why
uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and immutable.
A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me
to be needed throughout this inquiry.  Modern savages cannot
be exactly like primitive man, because they are not primitive.
Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern.
Something has happened to their race as much as to ours,
during the thousands of years of our existence and endurance on
the earth.  They have had some experiences, and have presumably
acted on them if not profited by them.  Like the rest of us.
They have had some environment, and even some change of environment,
and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper
and decorous evolutionary manner.  This would be true even
if the experiences were mild or the environment dreary;
for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form
of monotony.  But it has appeared to a good many intelligent
and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience
of the savages has been that of a decline from civilisation.
Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any very
clear notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like.
Heaven help them, it is likely enough that they will soon find out.
They seem to be content if cave-men and cannibal islanders have
some things in common.  such as certain particular implements.
But it is obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced
for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common.
If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows;
but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men
who made bows and arrows.  It is said that the Russians in their
great retreat were so short of armament that they fought with
clubs cut in the wood.  But a professor of the future would err
in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian
tribe that had never been out of the wood.  It is like saying
that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first.
A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error
for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long
white beard.  Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty;
but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back,
and kick joyfully instead, will be disappointed.

It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must
have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings
of it.  There were almost certainly some things, there were probably
many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary.
An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an
example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature
and origin of government I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells
and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms.
If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this
portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse
it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot
for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed
he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances.
At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric
ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it
to be spelt with capital letters.  He says of the same potentate,
'No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.'
I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric
spear with a prehistoric label, 'Visitors are Requested
not to Touch,' or a complete throne with the inscription,
'Reserved for the Old Man.'  But it may be presumed that the writer,
who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out
of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious
parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man.
It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man
and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat.
It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious
and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases,
for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical.  But there is
not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic
and tyrannical.  It may have been, of course, for it may have
been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all.
But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth
century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically.
It does not even suggest it; it does not even begin to hint at it.
If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we
really do know, it is that despotism can be a development,
often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies
that have been highly democratic.  A despotism may almost be
defined as a tired democracy.  As fatigue falls on a community,
the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has
truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm
only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden
and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took
advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some
of the Sultans of the East.  But I cannot see why the Sultan should
have appeared any earlier in history than many other human figures.
On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously depends upon the
superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort comes with more
complex civilisation.  One man may kill twenty with a machine-gum;
it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint.
As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear,
it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a hundred hands.
Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any society,
ancient or modern.  Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic
and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest;
but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral
and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest.
But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices
of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled
and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one.
As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.

It is far more probable that a primitive society was something
like a pure democracy.  To this day the comparatively simple
agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies.
Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through
the complexity of civilisation.  Anyone who likes may state
it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation.
But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy
to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy
to complexity.  Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own
land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under
a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men.
It is surely as likely as not that such a simple idea was found
in the first condition of even simpler men.  Indeed the despotic
vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men.
Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort,
there is really no reason why men should not have had at least
as much camaraderie as rats or rooks.  Leadership of some
sort they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals;
but leadership implies no such irrational servility as that
attributed to the superstitious subjects of the Old Man.  There was
doubtless some body corresponding, to use Tennyson's expression,
to the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.
But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to act after
the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia,
it would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered
crow would not see many more winters.  It may be remarked,
in this connection, but even among animals it would seem
that something else is respected more than bestial violence,
if it be only the familiarity which in men is called
tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom.
I do not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if
they do they are certainly not following the strongest crow.
And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of
seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man,
then at least they have not our own servile sentimental weakness
for worshipping the Strong Man.

It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive
art and religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known
or rather guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess
to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village
as that it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan.
Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are modern
in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of growth
of history; but of the two the palace has much more the look
of being an accumulation and a corruption, the village much
more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive thing.
But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond
expressing a wholesome doubt about the current assumption.
I think it interesting, for instance, that liberal institutions
have been traced even by moderns back to barbarians
or undeveloped states, when it happened to be convenient
for the support of some race or nation or philosophy.
So the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal
property existed in very early times.  So the Jews are proud
of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under their ancient law.
So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries
and various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the north.
So the Celtophiles and those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland
have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan system, to which
the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow.  The strength
of the case varies in the different cases; but as there
is some case for all of them, I suspect there is some case
for the general proposition that popular institutions of some
sort were by no means uncommon in early and simple societies.
Each of these separate schools were making the admission
to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they
suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was
something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear.
Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind,
but he was willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest
that the stone axe might have been as republican as the guillotine.

But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress
In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history.
But it is not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history;
for it is a history we do not know.  Very probably it was exceedingly like
the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not know it.
It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history,
which professes to trace everything in a consistent course from
the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the agnostic.
So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer
creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably
people very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them.
In other words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time
when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised.
The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted
things like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people;
they describe communities that are roughly recognisable as communities
in our own sense.  Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell
that they have always been despotic.  Some of them may be already
decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old.
We do not know what really happened in the world before those records;
but the little we do know would leave us anything but astonished if we
learnt that it was very much like what happens in this world now.
There would be nothing inconsistent or confounding about
the discovery that those unknown ages were full of republics
collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics,
empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies.
Kingdoms combining again into world states and breaking up again
into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery
and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity
which may or may not be a progress but most assuredly a romance.
But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book;
and we shall never read them.

It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and
social stability.  According to the real records available, barbarism and
civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world.
They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still
exist side by side.  There were civilisations then as there are
civilisations now; there are savages now as there were savages then.
It is suggested that all men passed through a nomadic stage;
but it is certain that there are some who have never passed out of it,
and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it.
It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller
of the soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men;
and the chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania
for progressive stages that has largely falsified history.  It is
suggested that there was a communist stage, in which private property was
everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property;
but the evidences of this negation are themselves rather negative.
Redistributions of property, jubilees, and agrarian laws,
occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity
inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful as
the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it.
It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the
future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary
seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.  There is
an amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism.
In spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage
by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club,
it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry,
it was insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been
a matriarchy.  Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club.
Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; they have
a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads.
In any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may
repeat that when it comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism
and civilisation have always dwelt side by side in the world,
the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians,
sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases
possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions
which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as government
or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative arts,
mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the matter
of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the chief
concern of this enquiry; the thing that we call religion.

Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters,
might in this matter have been specially provided as models.
They might almost be called working models to show how these
modern theories do not work.  The two great truths we know
about these two great cultures happen to contradict flatly
the two current fallacies which have just been considered.
The story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man
does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous,
but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised.
He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much
the same thing, because he is exhausted And the story of Babylon
might have been invented to point the moral that man need not be
a nomad or a communist before he becomes a peasant or a citizen,
and that such cultures are not always in successive stages
but often in contemporary states.  Even touching these great
civilisations with which our written history begins there is
a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure.
We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense
from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones;
and we do definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian
hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the neolithic cave.
But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered
line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted
to read too much between the lines; even the real authority
on Babylon may forget how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge;
may forget that Babylon has only heaved half a brick at him,
though half a brick is better than no cuneiform.  But some truths,
historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary,
facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon;
and these two truths are among them.

Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation
of the desert.  It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity,
that it is created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister
benevolence of the Nile.  When we first hear of Egyptians they
are living as in a string of river-side villages, in small
and separate but co-operative communities along the bank
of the Nile.  Where the river branched into the broad Delta
there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different
district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth.
These more or less independent though interdependent peoples
were considerably civilised already.  They had a sort of heraldry;
that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes;
each sailing the Nile under its own ensign representing some bird
or animal.  Heraldry involves two things of enormous importance
to normal humanity; the combination of the two making that noble
thing called co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and
peoples that are free.  The art of heraldry means independence;
an image chosen by the imagination to express the individuality.
The science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement
between different bodies to recognise different images;
a science of imagery.  We have here therefore exactly that
compromise of co-operation between free families or groups which
is the most normal mode of life for humanity and is particularly
apparent wherever men own their own land and live on it.
With the very mention of the image of bird and beast the student
of mythology will murmur the word 'totem' almost in his sleep.
But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying
such words as if in his sleep.  Throughout this rough outline I have
made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather
than the outside of such things; to consider them where possible
in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology.
There is very little value in talking about totems unless we
have some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem.
Granted that they had totems and we have no totems; was it because
they had more fear of animals or more familiarity with animals?
Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a
man running away from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus
about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf,
or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves?  Was a totem a thing
like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was
the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo,
or of children about Jumbo?  I have never read any book of folk-lore,
however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,
which I think by far the most important one.  I will confine myself
to repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common
understanding about the images that stood for their individual states;
and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense
that it is already there at the beginning of history.
But as history unfolds itself, this question of communication
is clearly the main question of these riverside communities.
With the need of communication comes the need of a common government
and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of the king.
The other binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than
the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably
even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men
can communicate.  And here in Egypt arose probably the primary
and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history,
and the whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric:
the archetypal script, the art of writing.

The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half
so popular as they might be.  There is shed over them
the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and
even healthy sadness of heathen men.  It is part of the same
sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man
a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear.
It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most
by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.
For them anything primary and elemental must be evil.
But it is the curious consequence that while we have been
deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance,
they have all missed the real romance of being primitive.
They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which
the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues;
in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted
as their own most archaic art.  But none of these makers of
imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what it must really have
been like to see those things as fresh which we see as familiar.
They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child
discovering fireworks.  They have not seen a man playing with
the wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing
at putting up a wireless station.  They have never put the spirit
of youth into their descriptions of the youth of the world.
It follows that amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies
there are no jokes.  There are not even practical jokes,
in connection with the practical inventions.  And this is
very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics;
for there seems to be serious indication that the whole high
human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.

There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun
with a pun.  The king or the priests or some responsible persons,
wishing to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long
and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture writing,
like that of the Red Indian.  Like most people who have written
picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not always fit.
But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig,
he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it.
So a modern hieroglyphist might represent 'at once' by unscrupulously
drawing a hat followed by a series of upright numerals.
It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him.
But it must have been great fun to write or even to read
these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing.
And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it
seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold
them from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would
really remind us that the ancient Egyptians were human beings.
I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the great
monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with
laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew
more and more wild and indefensible.  There might be another scene
of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher;
the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular
thrill of a detective story.  That is how primitive romance
and primitive history really ought to be written.  For whatever
was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times,
and it was probably much more human than is conventionally supposed,
the scientific interest of such a time must have been intense.
Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy;
and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks.
We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively story of
primitive life.  The point is in some sense a parenthesis here;
but it is connected with the general matter of political development,
by the institution which was most active in these first and most
fascinating of all the fairy-tales of science.

It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests.
Modern writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness
of sympathy with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least
in recognising what pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences.
Among the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a
convention of saying that priests had obstructed progress in all ages;
and a politician once told me in a debate that I was resisting
modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted
the discovery of wheels.  I pointed out, in reply, that it was far
more likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels.
It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal
to do with the discovery of the art of writing.  It is obvious enough in
the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy.
The religion of these priests was apparently a more or less tangled
polytheism of a type that is more particularly described elsewhere.
It passed through a period when it cooperated with the king,
another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king,
who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a third
period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his stead.
But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers
common and necessary:  and the creators of those common things
ought really to have a place among the heroes of humanity.
If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless
in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay
some sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind.
We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or
the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse.
And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more
sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues
of stale politicians and philanthropists.  But one of the strange
marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came,
no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.

The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government,
whether pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary
to establish communication; and there always went with communication
a certain element of coercion.  It is not necessarily an indefensible
thing that the state grew more despotic as it grew more civilised;
it is arguable that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow
more civilised.  That is the argument for autocracy in every age;
and the interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the earliest age.
But it is emphatically not true that it was most despotic
in the earliest age and grew more liberal in a later age;
the practical process of history is exactly the reverse.
It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of
the Old Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt,
that the Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions.
His spear grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher
and higher, as Egypt rose into a complex and complete civilisation.
That is what I mean by saying that the history of the Egyptian
territory is in this the history of the earth; and directly denies
the vulgar assumption that terrorism can only come at the beginning
and cannot come at the end.  We do not know what was the very first
condition of the more or less feudal amalgam of land owners,
peasants and slaves in the little commonwealths beside the Nile;
but it may have been a peasantry of an even more popular sort.
What we do know is that it was by experience and education that
little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty
is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern;
and it is at the end of the path called progress that men return
to the king.

Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings,
the primary problem of liberty and civilisation.
It is the fact that men actually lose variety by complexity.
We have not solved the problem properly any more than they did;
but it vulgarises the human dignity of the problem itself to
suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in tribal terror.
And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy about
despotism and civilisation, so does the Babylonian example
refute the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism.
Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised;
for the simple reason that we cannot hear of anything until it is
educated enough to talk.  It talks to us in what is called cuneiform;
that strange and stiff triangular symbolism that contrasts
with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt.  However relatively
rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something different
from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any art.
There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and something
of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows
and the birds.  Perhaps there is something of the restrained
but living curve of the river, which makes us in talking of
the serpent of old Nile almost think of the Nile as a serpent.
Babylon was a civilisation of diagrams rather than of drawings.
Mr. W.B. Yeats who has a historical imagination to match his
mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible
without the latter) wrote truly of the men who watched the stars
'from their pedantic Babylon.'  The cuneiform was cut upon bricks,
of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks
were of baked mud and perhaps the material had something in it
forbidding the sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief.
Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation, far advanced
in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern.  It is said
that they had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood
and recognised an official class of independent working women.
There is perhaps something in that mighty stronghold of hardened
mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a huge hive.
But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same social
problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever
its evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man.
It stood, of course, in the triangle formed by the almost
legendary rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture
of its empire, on which its towns depended, was perfected by a
highly scientific system of canals.  It had by tradition a high
intellectual life, though rather philosophic than artistic;
and there preside over its primal foundation those figures
who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of antiquity;
the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.

Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick,
there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads.  They came
out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from
the beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless
to dwell on the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even
easy enough to follow a herd or a flock which generally found its
own grazing-ground and to live on the milk or meat it provided.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that this habit of life could
give almost every human thing except a home.  Many such shepherds
or herds men may have talked in the earliest time of all the truths
and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these were Abraham and
his children, who have given to the modern world for an endless
enigma the almost mono-maniac monotheism of the Jews.  But they were
a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation;
and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it
again and again.  The history of Babylonia is largely the history
of its defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals
of a century or two and generally retreated as they came.
Some say that an admixture of nomad invasion built at Nineveh
the arrogant kingdom of the Assyrians, who carved great monsters
upon their temples, bearded bulls with wings like cherubim,
and who sent forth many military conquerors who stamped the world
as if with such colossal hooves.  Assyria was an imperial interlude;
but it was an interlude.  The main story of all that land is the war
between the wandering peoples and the state that was truly static.
Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic times,
those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find.
The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was
in historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.

Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has
been suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still
current that nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social
settlement a comparatively recent thing.  There is nothing to show
that the Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little
to show that the tribes of the desert ever settled down.
Indeed it is probable that this notion of a nomadic stage followed
by a static stage has already been abandoned by the sincere
and genuine scholars to whose researches we all owe so much.
But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars,
but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely
spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made
fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity.
It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man
and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man
and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism
and forward to civilisation.  Unfortunately this notion is
in a double sense entirely in the air.  It is an atmosphere
in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend.
Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by theories;
and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that assumption,
in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked
for a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant,
vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder
of the Babylonian wall.

One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow.
Our glimpses of both these early empires show that the first
domestic relation had been complicated by something which was
less human, but was often regarded as equally domestic.
The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like a genii
and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone.
Here again we must not too easily assume that what was backward
was barbaric; in the matter of manumission the earlier
servitude seems in some ways more liberal than the later;
perhaps more liberal than the servitude of the future.
To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work was after all
a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be tried again.
But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery.
It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity
before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last.
It is the insignificance of the individual before the State.  It was
as true of the most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism
in Babylon.  It is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole
class of individuals could be insignificant or even invisible.
It must be normal because it was needed for what would now be
called 'social service.'  Somebody said, 'The Man is nothing and
the Work is all,' meaning it for a breezy Carlylean commonplace.
It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile State.  In that
sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast pillars
and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever
by the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants
and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.

But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points
of Egypt and Babylon.  For one thing they are fixed in tradition
as the types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead.
Babylon is still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt
(with its enormous population of princesses awaiting reincarnation)
is still the topic of an unnecessary number of novels.
But a tradition is generally a truth; so long as the tradition
is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost vulgar.
And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian
element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the news papers,
normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as
the reign of Tutankhamen.  The first reason is full of the common
sense of popular legend; it is the simple fact that we do know
more of these traditional things than of other contemporary things;
and that we always did.  All travellers from Herodotus
to Lord Carnarvon follow this route.  Scientific speculations
of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the whole primitive world,
with streams of racial emigration or admixture marked in dotted
lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific medieval
map-maker would have been content to call 'Terra incognita,'
if he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon,
to indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims.
But these speculations are only speculations at the best;
and at the worst the dotted lines can be far more fabulous
than the dragon.

There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men
to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially
those who are most imaginative.  It is the fallacy of suppositing
that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it
is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain.
If a man lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be
told that he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire
is certainly a splendid and spacious and impressive thing.
Or alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire,
and be duly impressed.  But the curious thing is that in certain
mental states he can feel much more certain about the Chinese Empire
that he can not see than about the straw hut that he can see.
He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by which his argument
begins with the empire though his experience begins with the hut.
Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a straw hut cannot
exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is impossible for such
a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel as he inhabits.
But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of supposing
that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis,
therefore it is something more than a hypothesis.  Now modern people
are perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much
less real and certain than the Chinese Empire.  They seem to forget,
for instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System
as he is certain of the South Downs.  The Solar System is a deduction,
and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is
a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore he forgets
that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle.
He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation;
and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the same.
But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready
to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system.
If this is a fallacy even in the case of facts pretty well ascertained,
such as the Solar System and the Chinese Empire, it is an even
more devastating fallacy in connection with theories and other
things that are not really ascertained at all.  Thus history,
especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of beginning
with certain generalisations about races.  I will not describe
the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics.
Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation,
men talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race.
Because they have themselves invented a reason to explain a result,
they almost deny the result in order to justify the reason.  They first
treat a Celt as an axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference.
And then they are surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman
is angry at being treated as an inference.  They cannot see that
the Irish are Irish whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there
ever were any Celts.  And what misleads them once more is the size
of the theory; the sense that the fancy is bigger than the fact.
A great scattered Celtic race is supposed to contain the Irish,
so of course the Irish must depend for their very existence upon it.
The same confusion, of course, has eliminated the English and the Germans
by swamping them in the Teutonic race; and some tried to prove
from the races being at one that the nations could not be at war.
But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed examples in passing, as more
familiar examples of the fallacy; the matter at issue here is not its
application to these modern things but rather to the most ancient things.
But the more remote and unrecorded was the racial problem, the more fixed
was this curious inverted certainty in the Victorian man of science.
To this day it gives a man of those scientific traditions the same
sort of shock to question these things, which were only the last
inferences when he turned them into first principles.  He is still
more certain that he is an Aryan even than that he is an Anglo-Saxon,
just as he is more certain that he is an Anglo-Saxon than that he is
an Englishman.  He has never really discovered that he is a European.
But he has never doubted that he is an Indo-European. These Victorian
theories have shifted a great deal in their shape and scope;
but this habit of a rapid hardening of a hypothesis into a theory,
and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly yet gone out of fashion.
People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling
that the foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first
steps must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious.
But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is
the very contrary of the truth.  It is the large thing that is secret
and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.

Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject
of these speculations, and it is impossible even to suggest an
outline of the subject.  But if we take the European race alone,
its history, or rather its prehistory, has undergone many
retrospective revolutions in the short period of my own lifetime.
It used to be called the Caucasian race; and I read in childhood
an account of its collision with the Mongolian race; it was written
by Bret Harte and opened with the query 'Or is the Caucasian played out?'
Apparently the Caucasian was played out, for in a very short time he had
been turned into the Indo-European man; sometimes, I regret to say,
proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic man.  It seems that the Hindu
and the German have similar words for mother or father; there were
other similarities between Sanskrit and various Western tongues;
and with that all superficial differences between a Hindu and a German
seemed suddenly to disappear.  Generally this composite person was
more conveniently described as the Aryan, and the really important
point was that he had marched westward out of those high lands
of India where fragments of his language could still be found.
When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the Aryan
need not have marched westward and left his language behind him;
he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him.
If I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing
my ignorance of the whole matter.  But as a matter of fact I
have great difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being
written now.  It looks as if the Aryan is also played out.
Anyhow he has not merely changed his name but changed his address;
his starting-place and his route of travel.  One new theory maintains
that our race did not come to its present home from the East
but from the South.  Some say the Europeans did not come from Asia
but from Africa.  Some have even had the wild idea that the Europeans
came from Europe; or rather that they never left it.

Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric
pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the
Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over
the hills into the fields in Italy.  But I merely mention this example
of European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed
the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned,
cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree.
But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs
is a little rusty from want of use.  The first act of common sense
is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain.
And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense
that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.

The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see,
as distinct from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest
phase of history is darkness covering the earth and great darkness
the peoples, with a light or two gleaming here and there on
chance patches of humanity; and that two of these flames do burn
upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon the high terraces
of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile.  There are indeed
other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be
very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast wilderness of night.
Far away to the east there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity
in China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and
South America and other places, some of them apparently so high
in civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of
devil-worship. But the difference lies in the element old tradition;
the tradition of these lost cultures has been broken off,
and though the tradition of China still lives, it is doubtful whether
we know anything about it.  Moreover, a man trying to measure
the Chinese antiquity has to use Chinese traditions of measurement;
and he has a strange sensation of having passed into another world
under other laws of time and space.  Time is telescoped outwards
and centuries assume the slow and stiff movement of aeons; the white
man trying to see it as the yellow man sees, feels as if his head
were turning round and wonders wildly whether it is growing a pigtail.
Any how he cannot take in a scientific sense that queer perspective
that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first of the Sons
of Heaven.  He is the real antipodes; the only true alternative world
to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking upside down.
I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon;
but what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters,
would expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent
and amiable being?  Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition
something will be said in another connection; but I am only talking
of tradition and the test of antiquity.  And I only mention China
as an antiquity that is not for us reached by a bridge old tradition;
and Babylon and Egypt as antiquities that are.  Herodotus is a
human being, in a sense in which a Chinaman in a billy-cock hat,
sitting opposite to us in a London tea shop, is hardly human.
We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah felt like, in a way
in which we never were quite certain what Li Hung Chang felt like.
The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba have passed into
a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even of pardon.
The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying.
This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation
of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to
modern Europe.  But when we ask what was that world that we inherit,
and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it,
we are led to the central fact of civilised history.

That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of
water as a world.  But it was a world with something of the character
of such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification
in which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met.
The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean;
so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a
Mediterranean civilisation.  The glamour of the great sea spread
indeed very far in land and the unity was felt among the Arabs
alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern hills.
But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all
the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity.
As will be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a
good business.  In that orbis terrarum or circle of lands there
were the extremes of evil and of piety, there were contrasted
races and still more contrasted religions.  It was the scene
of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe from the night
of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish
ships at Lepanto.  It was the scene, as will be more especially
suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the two
types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and
the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart.
It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil,
the world of all that matters most, with all respect to the
Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter
as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters.
Between it and the Far East there were, of course, interesting cults
and conquests of various kinds, more or less in touch with it,
and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to us.
The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon;
and we are told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned
to draw the bow and tell the truth.  Alexander the great Greek
marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise and brought back
strange birds coloured like the sunrise clouds and strange flowers
and jewels from the gardens and treasuries of nameless kings.
Islam went eastward into that world and made it partly imaginable
to us; precisely because Islam itself was born in that circle
of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea.
In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its
majesty without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China
and the Chinese apparently took very little notice of them.
All these things are interesting in themselves; but it is
impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces
of Asia from the inland sea of Europe.  When all is said,
if there were nothing in the world but what was said and done
and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean,
it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things
the world in which we live.  When that southern culture spread
to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things;
of which doubtless we ourselves are the most wonderful.
When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it was
still the same culture so long as it was culture at all.
But round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves,
apart from all extensions and echoes and commentaries
on the things, the Republic and the Church; the Bible
and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories
of the lost empires, Aristotle and the measure of all things.
It is because the first light upon this world is really light,
the daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely
the doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun
here with noting where that light first falls on the towered
cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim,
in the very fact of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles
to us but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine
that they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea;
or that all the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic
or Coptic, still less merely Asiatic or African.  Real research
is more and more exalting the ancient civilisation of Europe and
especially of what we may still vaguely call the Greeks.  It must
be understood in the sense that there were Greeks before the Greeks,
as in so many of their mythologies there were gods before the gods.
The island of Crete was the centre of the civilisation now
called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient legend
and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology.
This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage
and its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some
invasion of its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas
we know in history.  But that earlier period did not pass till
it had given to the world gifts so great that the world has ever
since been striving in vain to repay them, if only by plagiarism.

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands
was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call
a village or hamlet with a wall.  It was called Ilion but it came
to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth.
A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been
unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind,
composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover
the most beautiful woman in the world.  That the most beautiful woman
in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend;
that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody
who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.
It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive
culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to
have seen that culture in its prime.  But anyhow it is true that this,
which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too.
It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken
by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision.
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive
would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another
element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been
given its proper place in history.  The poet has so conceived the poem
that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly,
are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor.
And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even
as the poetical origin itself recedes.  Achilles had some status as a sort
of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times.
But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is
the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend
puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of
the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat.
The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion
were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.

The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up
forever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope.
Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages.
But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended
in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it
was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed.
And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic
lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure
of the Knight.  There is a prophetic coincidence in his title;
we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle
the horseman with the horse.  It is almost anticipated ages
before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long
leaping word with which the Iliad ends.  It is that very unity
for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry.
But there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity
the name upon the sacred town.  The sanctity of such towns
ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the northern
Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died.
From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen.
Hellas with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier
than that walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man.
Hellas of the hundred statues was one legend and literature;
and all that labyrinth of little walled nations resounding
with the lament of Troy.

A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that
stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore.
It was true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root.
A mystery of honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride,
there shone like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa;
till the light of a new day was loosened, with the rushing
of the eagles and the coming of the name; the name that came
like a thunderclap when the world woke to Rome.


* * *


IV

GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION

I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an
ancient British city by a professor, who said something
that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors.
Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an
iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it was a joke
against a great deal of what is called comparative religion.
I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual
halo of rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc,
instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune
or Jupiter.  'Yes,' he said with a certain delicate exactitude,
'that is supposed to represent the local god Sul.  The best
authorities identify Sul with Minerva, but this has been held
to show that the identification is not complete.'

That is what we call a powerful understatement.  The modern world
is madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his
burlesque don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern
research to be a Silenus.  But that is not better than the real
appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum.  Only both
of them are very like many identifications by 'the best authorities'
on comparative religion; and when Catholic creeds are identified
with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself;
I confine myself decorously to saying that the identification
is not complete.

In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly
applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped
corporate mankind as a Supreme Being.  Even in the days of my youth,
I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising
and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even
maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is
a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons
nor dividing the substance.

But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more
imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind.
And it has a much better light to be called, in a reasonable sense,
the religion of humanity.  Man is not indeed the idol; but man
is almost everywhere the idolator.  And these multitudinous
idolatries of man kind have something about them in many ways
more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical abstractions.
If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it
an idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us
and not farther away.  But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson,
when out for a Sunday walk, were transformed and amalgamated into
an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem farther away.
If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same
composite body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell.
If the heads of an three gentlemen appeared smiling on the same neck,
we should hesitate even by what name to address our new and somewhat
abnormal friend.  In the many-headed and many-handed Oriental idol there
is a certain sense of mysteries be coming at least partly intelligible;
of formless forces of nature taking some dark but material form,
but though this may be true of the multiform god it is not so of
the multiform man The human beings be come less human by becoming
less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely.
The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated;
we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us
the farther they are away.  An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian
sort of religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle
of preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine.
One consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of
'Nearer Mankind to Thee, nearer to Thee.'  It always suggested to me
the sensations of a strap-hanged during a crush on the Tube.  But it
is strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem,
when their bodies are so near as all that.

The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this
modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion
than a communion.  It is a thing to which human groups left to themselves,
and even human individuals left to themselves, have everywhere tended
by an instinct that may truly be called human.  Like all healthy human
things, it has varied very much within the limits of a general character;
for that is characteristic of everything belonging to that ancient land
of liberty that lies before and around the servile industrial town.
Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all of one pattern;
that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and drink the same
bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the South might
recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned salmon.
But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley
and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine
once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county
to county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese.
When I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something
that doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here
maintain that it is one thing.  I will maintain that most of the modern
botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing.
I will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative
religion and the separate religious founders of the world, the first
essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost
native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind.
This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it
is the one real rival to the Church of Christ.

Comparative religion is very comparative indeed.  That is,
it is so much a matter of degree and distance and difference
that it is only comparatively successful when it tries to compare.
When we come to look at it closely we find it comparing things
that are really quite incomparable.  We are accustomed to see a table
or catalogue of the world's great religions in parallel columns,
until we fancy they are really parallel.  We are accustomed
to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row:
Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius.  But in truth this is only a trick,
another of these optical illusions by which any objects may be put
into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of sight.
Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we
choose to lump together as religions and religious founders,
do not really show any common character.  The illusion is partly
produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the list;
as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation
of Christianity.  But the other eastern religions, or what we
call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble
each other.  When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list,
we come to something in a totally different world of thought.
To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing
a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer
in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American.  Confucianism may
be a civilisation but it is not a religion.

In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique.
For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here
there is no parallel.  It is not easy, therefore, to expose
the fallacy by which a false classification is created
to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a unique thing.
As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there
is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy.  But I will take
the nearest thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon,
in order to show how it is thus swamped and assimilated.
I imagine most of us would agree that there is something unusual
and unique about the position of the Jews.  There is nothing
that is quite in the same sense an international nation;
an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still
distinct and indestructible.  Now this business is like an attempt
to make a list of Nomadic Nations in order to soften the strange
solitude of the Jew.  It would be easy enough to do it,
by the same process of putting a plausible approximation first,
and then tailing off into totally different things thrown
in somehow to make up the list.  Thus in the new list of
nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the Gypsies;
who at least are really nomadic if they are not really national.
Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics could
pass easily on to something different; even if it was very different.
He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who had
scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call them nomads.
It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be
strangely restless in England.  It is quite true that not all
of them have left their country for their country's good.
The moment we mention the wandering empire of the English,
we must add the strange exiled empire of the Irish.  For it
is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial literature,
that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of English
enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure.
Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully
and remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters,
German barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves
in England and the United States and the South American republics.
The Germans would go down as the fifth nomadic race; the words
Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering would come in very useful here.
For there really have been historians who explained the
Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found wandering
(as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood
of Palestine.  Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end,
would make a last leap in desperation.  He would recall the fact
that the French army has captured nearly every capital in Europe,
that it marched across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne
or Napoleon; and that would be wanderlust and that would be
the note of a nomadic race.  Thus he would have his six nomadic
nations all compact and complete, and would feel that the Jew
was no longer a sort of mysterious and even mystical exception.
But people with more common sense would probably realise
that he had only extended nomadism by extending the meaning
of nomadism, and that he had extended that until it really had
no meaning at all.  It is quite true that the French soldier
has made some of the finest marches in all military history.
But it is equally true, and far more self-evident, that if
the French peasant is not a rooted reality there is no such
thing as a rooted reality in the world; or in other words,
if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.

Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case
of comparative religion and the world's religious founders
all standing respectably in a row.  It seeks to classify Jesus
as the other would classify Jews, by inventing a new class
for the purpose and filling up the rest of it with stop-gaps
and second-rate copies.  I do not mean that these other things
are not often great things in their own real character and class.
Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it is not
true to call them Churches; just as the French and English
are great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads.
There are some points of resemblance between Christendom
and its imitation in Islam; for that matter there are some
points of resemblance between Jews and Gypsies.  But after
that the lists are made up of anything that comes to hand;
of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being
in the same category.

In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference
to men much more learned than myself, I propose to cut
across and disregard this modern method of classification,
which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history.
I shall here submit an alternative classification of religion
or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all
the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies.
Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were vertically,
into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would
divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally;
into the strata of spiritual elements and influences that could
sometimes exist in the same country, or even in the same man.
Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed
to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind
under such headings as these:  God; the Gods; the Demons;
the Philosophers.  I believe some such classification will help
us to sort out the spiritual experiences of men much more
successfully than the conventional business of comparing religions;
and that many famous figures will naturally fall into their place
in this way who are only forced into their place in the other.
As I shall make use of these titles or terms more than once
in narrative and allusion, it will be well to define at this stage
for what I mean them to stand.  And I will begin with the first,
the simplest and the most sublime, in this chapter.

In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin
by an attempt to describe the indescribable.  Many get over
the difficulty of describing it by the expedient of denying it,
or at least ignoring it; but the whole point of it is that it was
something that was never quite eliminated even when it was ignored.
They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every
great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself.
They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree,
or something larger than itself.  Now there is very good ground
for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail
that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced.
Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it
was too large to be managed.  There is very good reason to suppose
that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea
of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such
things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation.
Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore students
are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view.
Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which
anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance,
are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone.
A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists,
who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling
them in return of the existence of the one good God who is
a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards.  And there
was a sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians,
as at somebody who was letting out a secret, and they cried
to each other, 'Atahocan!  He is speaking of Atahocan!'

Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency
among those polytheists not to speak of Atahocan.  The name
is not perhaps so much adapted as some of our own to direct
and solemn religious exhortation but many other social forces
are always covering up and confusing such simple ideas.
Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found irksome
in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was
more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion
of Spiritualism.  Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples.
They all testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing
taken for granted, as distinct from a thing talked about.
There is a striking example in a tale taken down word
for word from a Red Indian in California which starts out
with hearty legendary and literary relish:  'The sun is
the father and ruler of the heavens.  He is the big chief.
The moon is his wife and the stars are their children';
and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story,
in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that
the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered
that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.'
That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God.  He is
something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident;
a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans.  Sometimes the higher deity
is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery.
But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative
about his mythology and taciturn about his religion.
The Australian savages, indeed, exhibit a topsyturveydom such
as the ancients might have thought truly worthy of the antipodes.
The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle
as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped
in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic
cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable,
will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and
white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder
of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood,
the priest whispers the final secrets, known only to the initiate:
that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody
any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God,
the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.

In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the
savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts
of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts.
But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts
of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief.
The myths are merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky,
the water spout, or the tropic rain.  The mysteries are true stories,
and are taken secretly that they may be taken seriously.
Indeed it is only too easy to forget that there is a thrill in theism.
A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out
to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel.
It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river are the disguises
of one god and not of many.  Alas, we also find it only too easy
to take Atahocan for granted.  But whether he is allowed to fade into
a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret,
it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition.
There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of
the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it.
He is worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or
grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer
and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas.
Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing
as the Evolution of the Idea of God.  The idea was concealed,
was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away;
but it was never evolved.

There are not a few indications of this change in other places It
is implied, for instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems
often the combination of several monotheisms.  A god will gain
only a minor seat on Mount Olympus, when he had owned earth and
heaven and all the stars while he lived in his own little valley.
Like many a small nation melting in a great empire, he gives up
local universality only to come under universal limitation.
The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when
he had been a god of the world.  The very name of Jupiter is almost
a pagan translation of the words 'Our Father which art in heaven.'
As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the
Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth.  Demeter and Ceres
and Cybele often seem to be almost capable of taking over the whole
business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods.
It seems reasonably probable that a good many men did have no
other gods but one of these, worshipped as the author of all.

Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world
such as China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the
Great Father has never been very much complicated with rival cults,
though it may have in some sense ceased to be a cult itself.
The best authorities seem to think that though Confucianism
is in one sense agnosticism, it does not directly contradict
the old theism, precisely because it has become a rather
vague theism.  It is one in which God is called Heaven,
as in the case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms.
But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead.
We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded,
until it was remote without ceasing to be true.  And this phrase
alone would bring us back to the same idea even in the pagan
mythology of the West.  There is surely something of this very notion
of the withdrawal of some higher power, in all those mysterious
and very imaginative myths about the separation of earth and sky.
In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were
once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing,
often some undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world
was built on an abyss; upon a division and a parting.
One of its grossest versions was given by Greek civilisation
in the myth of Uranus and Saturn.  One of its most charming
versions was that of some savage niggers, who say that a little
pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky
like a lid; a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some
of our painters who love that tropical twilight.  Of myths,
and the highly mythical explanations which the moderns offer of myths,
something will be said in another section; for I cannot but think
that most mythology is on another and more superficial plane.
But in this primeval vision of the rending of one world
into two there is surely something more of ultimate ideas.
As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying on
his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading
all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folklore.
He will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought
to be nearer to us than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer
than it is, that it is not a thing merely alien and abysmal
but in some fashion sundered from us and saying farewell.
There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion that
after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf
or village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake,
but had in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute
to the Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood
was not talking like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time
went on, the tree-tops only told him he was further off from
heaven than when he was a boy.  But anyhow the legend of Uranus
the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the Time Spirit would
mean something to the author of that poem.  And it would mean,
among other things, this banishment of the first fatherhood.
There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were gods
before the gods.  There is an idea of greater simplicity in all
the allusions to that more ancient order.  The suggestion is
supported by the process of propagation we see in historic times.
Gods and demigods and heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes
and suggest of themselves that the family may have had one founder;
mythology grows more and more complicated, and the very
complication suggests that at the beginning it was more simple.
Even on the external evidence, of the sort called scientific,
there is therefore a very good case for the suggestion that man
began with monotheism before it developed or degenerated
into polytheism.  But I am concerned rather with an internal
than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal
truth is almost indescribable.  We have to speak of something
of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it;
we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech,
but from a strange silence.

I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism.
I suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these
savage creeds or Greek origins.  It is not exactly what we mean
by the presence of God; in a sense it might more truly be called
the absence of God.  But absence does not mean non-existence;
and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not mean
that from his life all friendship is absent.  It is a void but it
is not a negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw
higher than Olympus an empty throne.  It would be nearer
the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament,
in which the prophet saw God from behind; it was as if some
immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world.
Yet the meaning will again be missed, if it is supposed to be anything
so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his people.
I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least
overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering.
On the contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly,
as we all carry the load of the sky.  Gazing at some detail like
a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background;
we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down
upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing.
A thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather
subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made
by pagan literature and religion.  I repeat that in our special
sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence
of God.  But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence
of God.  We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry;
for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood
of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy.
We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age and again in the vague
implication that the gods themselves are ultimately related
to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded
into a Fate.  Above all we feel it in those immortal moments
when the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent
antiquity and speak with a more direct voice, so that no word
is worthy of it except our own monotheistic monosyllable.
We cannot say anything but 'God' in a sentence like that of Socrates
bidding farewell to his judges:  'I go to die and you remain
to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the better way.'
We can use no other word even for the best moments of
Marcus Aurelius:  'Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst
thou not say dear city of God?'  We can use no other word
in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer
with the veritable cry of a Christian before Christ:  'O you
that have borne things more terrible, to this also God shall
give an end.'

In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher
than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away.
Not yet could even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox
of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer.
For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant
that they dismissed it more and more from their minds.
It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I
shall write later.  Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit
admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most
of the mythologies like.  As the Jews would not degrade it
by images, so the Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations.
When the gods were more and more remembered only by pranks
and profligacies, it was relatively a movement of reverence.
It was an act of piety to forget God.  In other words,
there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting
that men had accepted a lower level, and still were half
conscious that it was a lower level.  It is hard to find words
for these things; yet the one really just word stands ready.
These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious
of nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity.
Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they
forget the height.  Some such tantalising blank or break
in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.  There is such
a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget.
And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth
that they have forgotten heaven.  But it remains true that even
for these men there were moments, like the memories of childhood,
when they heard themselves talking with a simpler language;
there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line
already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song
out of the tangle of the mythologies, the motley mob of gods
and goddesses sank suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father
was alone in the sky.

This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process.
A white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure
of Jupiter, of Pan or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be,
as already noted, that each was once a divinity as solitary
as Jehovah or Allah.  They lost this lonely universality
by a process it is here very necessary to note; a process of
amalgamation very like what was afterwards called syncretism.
The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon.  They admitted
more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the barbarians;
gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa.  The more the merrier,
though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry.
They admitted them to equal thrones with their own, sometimes they
identified them with their own.  They may have regarded it
as an enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final
loss of all that we now call religion.  It meant that ancient
light of simplicity, that had a single source like the sun,
finally fades away in a dazzle of conflicting Lights and colours.
God is really sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense
of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for him.

Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of
the pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions.
And this point is very important in many controversies ancient
and modern.  It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing
to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own;
and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened
when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth
some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains
or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods.  But exactly
what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all.
It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.
And the converse is also true.  Doubtless those more antiquated
men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their
single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages
benighted and left behind.  But these superstitious savages
were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power
as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science.
This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic
progressive has one consequence very much to the point.
In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies
in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light,
that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people.
In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer
was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning
of the Jews.

It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God
to the Jews.  It owes that truth to much that is blamed on the Jews,
possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews.  We have already
noted the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral
peoples upon the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something
of that strange erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark
territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed from the seat
of Abraham and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back
into the Palestinian hills and held them against the Philistines
from Crete and fell into captivity in Babylon; and yet again returned
to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the Persian conquerors;
and so continued that amazing romance of restlessness of which we
have not yet seen the end.  But through all their wanderings,
and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed
carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held
perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god.
We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless.
Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian
culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts
of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance
at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images.  It is a typical
example of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and
perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space.
The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit.
Nor would his statue in any case have had the disarming
dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian
statues afterwards.  He was living in a land of monsters.
We shall have occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were,
Moloch and Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess.  If the deity
of Israel had ever had an image, he would have had a phallic image.
By merely giving him a body they would have brought in all
the worst elements of mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism;
the vision of the harem in heaven.  This point about the refusal
of art is the first example of the limitations which are often
adversely criticised, only because the critics themselves are limited.
But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered
by the same critics.  It is often said with a sneer that the God
of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts'
pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe.
Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles.  Well it
is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe.
In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to
have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend.
It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretching
out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing
the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods;
the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian
pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla.  It would
have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened
course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions.
It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding
down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy
of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity
in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin.
The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that
contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall
have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness
of the Prophets of Israel.  As it was, while the whole world melted
into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called
tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal
and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind.
He was tribal enough to be universal.  He was as narrow as the universe.
In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There
was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god
called Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly
have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal
and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter,
the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all
suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become
an idol far worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been
as civilised as the gods of Tyre and Carthage.  What that civilisation
meant we shall consider more fully in the chapter that follows;
when we note how the power of demons nearly destroyed Europe and even
the heathen health of the world.  But the world's destiny would
have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in
the Mosaic tradition.  I hope in a subsequent section to show that I
am not without sympathy with all that health in the heathen world
that made its fairy-tales and its fanciful romances of religion.
But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in the long run;
and the world would have been lost if it had been unable to return
to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things.
That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets
and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer,
that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches
paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy
and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men,
all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and
restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene
blessing of a jealous God.

The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan
world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people.
The Jews were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness
already noted in the Roman world, partly perhaps because they
had already fallen into that habit of merely handling things
for exchange instead of working to make them with their hands.
It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle
in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realise
how completely it really was lost.  Apart from more disputed matters,
there were things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all
humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then.
They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world:
the Book of Job.  It obviously stands over against the Iliad and
the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting
and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world.
It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools,
the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time.
And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony,
precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical.
Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery.
Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted.  Herein is indeed
a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority.
For when he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,' it is true
that he who knows can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.'
And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart;
and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.
But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole
world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry.
It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept
their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept
a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world
of antiquity.  It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed
the Great Pyramid.  But there were other reasons for a cross-purpose
and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of paganism.
After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one-half
of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it
the bigger half.  I shall try to sketch in the next chapter
that love of locality and personality that ran through mythology;
here it need only be said that there was a truth in it that could
not be let out though it were a lighter and less essential truth.
The sorrow of Job had to be joined with the sorrow of Hector;
and while the former was the sorrow of the universe the latter
was the sorrow of the city; for Hector could only stand
pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy.  When God speaks
out of the whirlwind he may well speak in the wilderness.
But the monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied
civilisation of fields and fences and walled cities and temples
and towns; and the turn of these things also was to come, when the
two could be combined in a more definite and domestic religion.
Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher
whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or supposed
that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace.
Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition
of this deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism.
Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note, or giving the thing
a name, is in something far away from all that civilisation and more
remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel.  It is in a saying
I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men
are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes.
There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia
which is less sane than the soul of Christendom.  We should
call it despair, even if they would call it peace.
This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison
between Asia and Europe.  It is enough to say here that there
is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than
is implied for us in the passage from mythology to religion.
But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that it does
suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas
of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories.
It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no
comparison between God and the gods.  There is no more comparison than
there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams.
Under the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate
the twilight of that dream in which the gods walk about like men.
But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is
only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more,
for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine
extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a shudder
going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators,
and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled
stars and rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn
upon the death of all.

* * *

V

MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES

What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called
the day-dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams
can come true.  To compare them to travellers' tales is not to
deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales.
In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to himself.
All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men.
It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of
imagination and therefore a work of art.  It needs a poet to make it.
It needs a poet to criticise it.  There are more poets than non-poets
in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends.
But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only
the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical
studies of these popular poems.  We do not submit a sonnet to a
mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge
the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science.
Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not
appreciated at all.  When the professor is told by the Polynesian
that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent,
unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation
to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all.
When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a
primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box,
unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child
would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter.
This test is not nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric
children do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have
a certain simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world.
When Hiawatha was told by his nurse that a warrior threw his
grandmother up to the moon, he laughed like any English child told
by his nurse that a cow jumped over the moon.  The child sees
the joke as well as most men, and better than some scientific men.
But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is the appropriateness
of the inappropriate.  And the test must appear merely arbitrary
because it is merely artistic.  If any student tells me that
the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for tribal custom
of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did not.
If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only
because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not.
It happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow
to jump over the moon.  Mythology is a lost art, one of the few
arts that really are lost; but it is an art.  The horned moon and
the horned mooncalf make a harmonious and almost a quiet pattern.
And throwing your grandmother into the sky is not good behaviour;
but it is perfectly good taste.

Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand,
that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly.
They seldom allow for the legitimate liberty of the grotesque.
And they will dismiss a savage myth as merely coarse and clumsy
and an evidence of degradation, because it has not all the beauty
of the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;
when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle or the
Mad Hatter.  It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that
he always insists on poetry being poetical.  Sometimes the humour
is in the very subject as well as the style of the fable.
The Australian aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages,
have a story about a giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all
the waters of the world; and who was only forced to spill them
by being made to laugh.  All the animals with all their antics
passed before him and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused.
He collapsed at last before an eel who stood delicately balanced
on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity.
Any amount of fine fantastic literature might be made
out of that fable.  There is philosophy in that vision
of the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter.
There is imagination in the mountainous monster erupting
like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty of fun in the thought
of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed by.
Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave.

Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be
properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science.
Some myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children;
but the child is trying to draw.  It is none the less an error to treat
his drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram.
The student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage,
because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the world.
He is saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip
of the gods.  We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there
is time to examine it.  It would be truer to say it is accepted before
there is time to believe it.

I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or
(as it commonly is) of one myth.  It is true that something in our
nature and conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them
may be original.  One man does not borrow the story from the other man,
though he may tell it from the same motive as the other man.
It would be easy to apply the whole argument about legend
to literature; and turn it into a vulgar monomania of plagiarism.
I would undertake to trace a notion like that of the Golden Bough
through individual modern novels as easily as through communal
and antiquated myths.  I would undertake to find something
like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the fatal
bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess
of Ruritania.  But though these flowers may spring from the same soil,
it is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand.
Those flowers are always fresh.

The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often.
There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too
many cryptograms in Shakespeare.  Everything is phallic;
everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest;
everything is ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is
the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the sun and moon;
everything is everything.  Every folk-lore student who knew
a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider reading
and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed
that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning.
Yet the whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these
stories from the outside, as if they were scientific objects.
He has only to look at them from the inside, and ask himself
how he would begin a story.  A story may start with anything
and go anywhere.  It may start with a bird without the bird being
a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar myth.
It is said there are only ten plots in the world;
and there will certainly be common and recurrent elements.
Set ten thousand children talking at once, and telling tarradiddles
about what they did in the wood, and it will not be hard
to find parallels suggesting sun-worship or animal worship.
Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and some
perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories.
In the modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically.
It is strange that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is
now allowed to usurp where it has no rights at all,
to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with anarchy,
is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic
judgement on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question.
We may be fanciful about everything except fairy-tales.

Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most
subtle ideas.  Everybody ought to know that, for everybody
has been a child.  Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than
he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades.
And in this matter there are several fine shades.
Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called
the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story
in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his
anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold.
He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal.
Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands
in its garden like a headless statue.  One need only be a very
minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until
it spoke like a titan or a dryad.  It is often said that pagan
mythology was a personification of the powers of nature.
The phrase is true in a sense, but it is very unsatisfactory;
because it implies that the forces are abstractions and
the personification is artificial.  Myths are not allegories.
Natural powers are not in this case abstractions.  It is not
as if there were a God of Gravitation.  There may be a genius of
the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water.
The impersonation is not of something impersonal.  The point
is that the personality perfects the water with significance.
Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly;
he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially
given a human form, like a snow man.  He is something that gives
a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that snow
itself seems to be warm rather than cold.  The test therefore
is purely imaginative.  But imaginative does not mean imaginary.
It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective,
when they mean false.  Every true artist does feel, consciously
or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths;
that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.
In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is
something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees;
but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it;
that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less
in our most remote fellow-creatures And the danger of these things
being classified is that they may seem to be comprehended.
A really fine work of folklore, like The Golden Bough, will leave
too many readers with the idea, for instance, that this or that story
of a giant's or wizard's heart in a casket or a cave only 'means'
some stupid and static superstition called 'the external soul.'
But we do not know what these things mean, simply because we
do not know what we ourselves mean when we are moved by them.
Suppose somebody in a story says 'Pluck this flower and a princess
will die in a castle beyond the sea,' we do not know why something
stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems
almost inevitable.  Suppose we read 'And in the hour when the king
extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on
the coast of Hebrides.'  We do not know why the imagination has
accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such
correspondences seem really to correspond to something in the soul.
Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence
of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things
nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental
feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions
past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul.
The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in
the metaphors of poets.  The soul of such a metaphor is often
very emphatically an external soul.  The best critics have remarked
that in the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems
quite separate from the text.  It is as irrelevant as the remote
castle to the flower or the Hebridean coast to the candle.
Shelley compares the skylark to a young woman on a turret, to a rose
embedded in thick foliage, to a series of things that seem to be
about as unlike a skylark in the sky as anything we can imagine.
I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic in English literature
is the much-quoted passage in Keats's Nightingale about the casements
opening on the perilous foam.  And nobody notices that the image
seems to come from nowhere; that it appears abruptly after
some almost equally irrelevant remarks about Ruth; and that it
has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the poem.
If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably
expect to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside.
But it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find
a giant's heart in a casket under the sea.  Now, it would
be very dangerous to classify the metaphors of the poets.
When Shelley says that the cloud will rise 'like a child from
the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,' it would be quite possible
to call the first a case of the coarse primitive birth-myth
and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became
ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud;
and is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius,
only too ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.

Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept
in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions.
First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local.
So far from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often
images almost concentrated into idols.  The poet feels the mystery of a
particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department
of woods and forests.  He worships the peak of a particular mountain,
not the abstract idea of altitude.  So we find the god is not merely
water but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea
is single like a stream; the river that runs round the world.
Ultimately doubtless many deities are enlarged into elements; but they
are something more than omnipresent.  Apollo does not merely dwell
wherever the sun shines; his home is on the rock of Delphi.  Diana is
great enough to be in three places at once, earth and heaven and hell,
but greater is Diana of the Ephesians.  This localised feeling has its
lowest form in the mere fetish or talisman, such as millionaires put
on their motor-cars. But it can also harden into something like a high
and serious religion, where it is connected with high and serious duties;
into the gods of the city or even the gods of the hearth.

The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there
is every shade of sincerity--and insincerity.  In what sense
exactly did an Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to
Pallas Athena?  What scholar is really certain of the answer?
In what sense did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch
all the posts in the street or that he had to collect orange-peel?
In what sense does a child really think that he ought to step on
every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least fairly clear.
First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these forms
could become more solid without really becoming more serious.
Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty
of artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light
step of the somnambulist.  Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle,
crown him (by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move
in state under those ancient skies of morning; touching a series
of sacred posts carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods,
that stand at the limits of the land and of the life of man.
Make the child free of the marbles and mosaics of some classic temples
to play on a whole floor inlaid with squares of black and white;
and he will willingly make this fulfilment of his idle and drifting
daydream the clear field for a grave and graceful dance.
But the posts and the paving-stones are little more
and little less real than they are under modern limits.
They are not really much more serious for being taken seriously.
They have the sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity
of art as a symbol that expresses very real spiritualities
under the surface of life.  But they are only sincere in the same
sense as art; not sincere in the same sense as morality.
The eccentric's collection of orange-peel may turn to oranges in a
Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a Mediterranean myth.
But they are never on the same plane with the difference between
giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully placing
the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg.
Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not
of degree.  The child does not think it wrong to step on the
paving-stone as he thinks it wrong to step on the dog's tail.
And it is very certain that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy
first set Johnson touching the wooden posts, he never touched wood
with any of the feeling with which he stretched out his hands
to the timber of that terrible tree, which was the death of God
and the life of man

As already noted, this does not mean that there was no
reality or even no religious sentiment in such a mood.
As a matter of fact the Catholic Church has taken over with
uproarious success the whole of this popular business of giving
people local legends and lighter ceremonial movements.
In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in
touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not
be patronised by patron saints as much as by pagan gods.
And in any case there are degrees of seriousness in the most
natural make-believe. There is all the difference between fancying
there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying
a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening
ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we
have told ourselves is haunted.  Behind all these things
is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and
related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all,
even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.
We all understand that and the pagans understood it.
The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul except
with these doubts and fancies, with the consequence that we
to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism.
All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets,
in pagan Hellas for example, had an attitude towards their gods
which is quite queer and puzzling to men in the Christian era.
There seems to be an admitted conflict between the god and the man;
but everybody seems to be doubtful about which is the hero
and which is the villain.  This doubt does not merely apply
to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies
to a moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone;
or even to a regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes
in the Frogs.  Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed
above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere.
But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness
and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing
began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules
of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies
round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate
skies bear like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the
half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses
of the folk-tales of the forest, and buried amid vines and olives
the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of Olympus
the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece.  These are the myths:
and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.
But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully
realise that they are not and never were a religion,
in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.
They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion;
and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates;
the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality.
But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not
provide him with a creed.  A man did not stand up and say 'I
believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up
and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty,' and the rest
of the Apostles Creed.  Many believed in some and not in others,
or more in some and less in others, or only in a very vague poetical
sense in any.  There was no moment when they were all collected
into an orthodox order which men would fight and be tortured
to keep intact.  Still less did anybody ever say in that fashion:
'I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,' for outside
Olympus even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic.
It seems clear to me that Thor was not a god at all but a hero.
Nothing resembling a religion would picture anybody resembling
a god as groping like a pigmy in a great cavern, that turned
out to be the glove of a giant.  That is the glorious ignorance
called adventure Thor may have been a great adventurer;
but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with Jack
and the Beanstalk.  Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief,
possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity.  Polytheism fades
away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories;
it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists.
Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted
name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble
and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city.
But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name.
Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing
very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something
as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring of wine upon
the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice.
It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage
to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast
our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land.
This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big
for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes
them great.  But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic
agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated.
Where that gesture of surrender is most magnificent, as among
the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that the man
will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will
be the better for getting it.  It is said that in its grosser
forms there are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god
really eating the sacrifice.  But this fact is falsified
by the error that I put first in this note on mythology.
It is misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child
pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude
and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him.
A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing
to the god fruits as well as flowers.  But the degree of seriousness
in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree.
The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed.
Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist,
any more than he believes like a Christian.  He feels
the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents.
St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god.
But in truth all their gods were unknown gods.  And the real
break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom
they had ignorantly worshipped.

The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus.
It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination
alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all.
It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate
from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations.
It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent
or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few
Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then
only by trying to allegorise them.  But in reality the rivers
of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till
they meet in the sea of Christendom.  Simple secularists still
talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between
reason and religion.  The truth is that the Church was actually
the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.
There had never before been any such union of the priests
and the philosophers.  Mythology, then, sought god through
the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense
in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness.
But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs,
which neither logicians nor men of science can understand
It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a
thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime
of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow,
through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of
Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian
and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror
of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky,
it remained true to something about which there can be no argument;
something that makes it possible for some artist of some school
to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say,
'My dream has come true.'  Therefore do we all in fact feel
that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive,
so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest.
Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire
from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive
person explains what it means.  Therefore we all know
the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told.
In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths,
but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems.
Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power
began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud,
whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble
of the mountains of Hellas.  But there was always a trouble in
the triumph, which in these pages I have tried to analyse in vain;
but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship;
even natural to worship unnatural things.  The posture of the idol
might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper
was generous and beautiful.  He not only felt freer when he bent;
he actually felt taller when he bowed.  Henceforth anything that took
away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever.
Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition.
If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.
We therefore feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double
feeling of trust and distrust.  When the man makes the gesture of
salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours out the libation or lifts
up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and a virile thing.
He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made.
His imaginative experiment is therefore justified.  But precisely
because it began with imagination, there is to the end something
of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it.  This mockery,
in the more in tense moments of the intellect, becomes the almost
intolerable irony of Greek tragedy.  There seems a disproportion
between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god.
The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god.
All the order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory
to certain parts of our nature; except the very centre of it,
which seems strangely mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame.
It is the first thought round which the whole has been built;
and the first thought is still a fancy and almost a frivolity.
In that strange place of meeting, the man seems more statuesque
than the statue.  He himself can stand for ever in the noble and
natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy.  But whatever
name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or Apollo,
the god whom he worships is Proteus.

The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy
a need.  It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands
are lifted; but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty.
About the nature of that need there will be more to say; but at this
point it may be said that perhaps after all this true instinct,
that player and sacrifice are a liberty and an enlargement, refers back
to that vast and half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood.
which we have already seen everywhere fading from the morning sky.
This is true; and yet it is not all the truth.  There remains
an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan,
that he is not entirely wrong in localising his God.  It is something
in the soul of poetry if not of piety.  And the greatest of poets,
when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe
or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language,
a local habitation and a name.  No poet is merely a pantheist;
those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley,
start with some local and particular image as the pagans did.
After all, Shelley wrote of the skylark because it was a skylark.
You could not issue an imperial or international translation of it
for use in South America, in which it was changed to an ostrich.
So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles,
hovering either to find a place or to return to it.  In a word,
mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent
desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity
in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and
mysterious levity about all the places found.  So far could the lonely
imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason.
Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.

That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality
in which these different dimensions met in a sort of solid.
They differed from the reality not in what they looked like
but in what they were.  A picture may look like a landscape;
it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape.
The only detail in which it differs is that it is not a landscape.
The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth
from Queen Elizabeth.  Only in this mythical and mystical world
the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was
therefore more vague and doubtful.  But anybody who has felt and fed
on the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean, when I say
that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities.
The pagans had dreams about realities; and they would have
been the first to admit, in their own words, that some came
through the gate of ivory and others through the gate of horn.
The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they touch
on those tender or tragic things, which can really make a sleeper
awaken with the sense that his heart has been broken in his sleep.
They tend continually to hover over certain passionate themes
of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death or a death
that is the beginning of life.  Demeter wanders over a stricken
world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms
over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there
is lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods
for Adonis.  There mingles with all such mourning the mystical
and profound sense that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement;
that such death gives us a divine blood for a renovating river
and that all good is found in gathering the broken body of the god.
We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we remember
that foreshadowings are shadows.  And the metaphor of a shadow
happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here.
For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but
not texture.  These things were something like the real thing;
and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.
Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog;
and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man.
Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really
thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought
of Adonis as the founder of a Church.  There was no idea that
any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their
recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of
the changelessness of the world.  Not one of them was a revolution,
save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon.
Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean
the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue.  In certain
sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort
of a god might satisfy them; but they do not profess to be satisfied.
Anyone who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.

Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism
than with Christianity.  Those who call these cults 'religions,'
and 'compare' them with the certitude and challenge of the Church
have much less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human,
or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the air
like a song.  It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove
that hunger is the same as food.  It is no very genial understanding
of youth to argue that hope destroys the need for happiness.
And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind,
admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world
with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because
they were concrete.  We might as well say that a boy playing
at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the trenches;
or that boy's first fancies about 'the not impossible she'
are the same as the sacrament of marriage.  They are fundamentally
different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might
almost say they are not the same even when they are the same.
They are only different because one is real and the other is not.
I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true
and the other is not.  I mean that one was never meant to be
true in the same sense as the other.  The sense in which it
was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here,
but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable.
It is so subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival
to our religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study.
We know better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars,
what was in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis
and why the Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death.
We have entered more deeply than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries
and have passed a higher grade, where gate within gate guarded
the wisdom of Orpheus.  We know the meaning of all the myths.
We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate.
And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying 'These
things are.'  It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying,
'Why cannot these things be?'


* * *

VI

THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS


I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort
of paganism, which has crowded the world with temples and is
everywhere the parent of popular festivity.  For the central
history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two further
stages before the final stage of Christendom.  The first
was the struggle between this paganism and something less
worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it
grew in itself less worthy.  In this very varied and often
very vague polytheism there was a weakness of original sin.
Pagan gods were depicted as tossing men like dice;
and indeed they are loaded dice.  About sex especially men
are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad.
They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity.
This disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled
the end of paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods.
But the first point to realise is that this sort of paganism
had an early collision with another sort of paganism;
and that the issue of that essentially spiritual struggle really
determined the history of the world.  In order to understand
it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism.
It can be considered much more briefly; indeed there is a very
real sense in which the less that is said about it the better.
If we have called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we
might very well call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.

Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages.
I remember defending the religious tradition against a whole
luncheon table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end
of our conversation every one of them had procured from
his pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or
talisman from which he admitted that he was never separated.
I was the only person present who had neglected to provide
himself with a fetish.  Superstition recurs in a rationalist
age because it rests on something which, if not identical
with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism.
It is at least very closely connected with agnosticism.  It rests
on something that is really a very human and intelligible sentiment,
like the local invocations of the numen in popular paganism.
But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two feelings:
first that we do not really know the laws of the universe;
and second that they may be very different to all we call reason.
Such men realise the real truth that enormous things do often
turn upon tiny things.  When a whisper comes, from tradition
or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the key or clue,
something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature
tells them that it is not unlikely.  This feeling exists
in both the forms of paganism here under consideration.
But when we come to the second form of it, we find it transformed
and filled with another and more terrible spirit.

In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology,
I have said little about the most disputable aspect of it;
the extent to which such invocation of the spirits of the sea
or the elements can indeed call spirits from the vasty deep;
or rather, (as the Shakespearean scoffer put it) whether the
spirits come when they are called.  I believe that I am right
in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not
play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology.
But I think it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things
of that sort have sometimes appeared, even if they were
only appearances.  But when we come to the world of superstition,
in a more subtle sense, there is a shade of difference;
a deepening and a darkening shade.  Doubtless most popular
superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology.
Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt
at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves
with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it.
There is no more in it than what I have already adumbrated; a sort
of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a world.
But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely
look for results; what might be called a realistic superstition.
And with that the question of whether spirits do answer or do
appear becomes much more serious.  As I have said, it seems to me
pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a
distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world.
Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer
to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether
it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier
to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has
been much more practical and much less poetical than the white
magic of mythology.  I fancy the garden of the witch has been
kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph.
I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good.
To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse,
drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems.
There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker
powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them.
And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point.
The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them.
They had a great deal of good nonsense about them;
in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the
nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live.
But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt
in consulting a detective, especially a private detective;
that it was dirty work but the work would really be done.
A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph;
he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph.  It was an
adventure rather than an assignation.  But the devil really
kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises;
even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth,
that he had broken them.

In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather
that the cult of demons often came after the cult of deities,
and even after the cult of one single and supreme deity.
It may be suspected that in almost all such places
the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal
in certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits
because they are in a more literal sense familiar spirits.
But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done,
a new idea appears more worthy of the demons.  It may indeed
be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons;
of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society.
Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle,
some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden
spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world.
And there is after all something in the idea of such an
Open Sesame.  But with the appeal to lower spirits comes
the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small
but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly
ugly and unworthy sort.  Sooner or later a man deliberately
sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of.
It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention
or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world.
This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world.
For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit.
It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art's sake.
Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible;
but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible.
They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors.
That is why it is often found that rude races like the Australian
natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and
intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are.
They are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes
in a self-conscious diabolism.  But if we could understand
their minds, or even really understand their language,
we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant,
that is as innocent cannibals.  They are not doing it
because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they
do think it wrong.  They are acting like a Parisian decadent
at a Black Mass.  But the Black Mass has to hide underground
from the presence of the real Mass.  In other words, the demons
have really been in hiding since the coming of Christ on earth.
The cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from
the civilisation of the white man.  But before Christendom,
and especially outside Europe, this was not always so.
In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons.
They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods.
Their enormous images could be set up in public temples
in the centre of populous cities.  And all over the world
the traces can be found of this striking and solid fact,
so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all such
evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter
of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the world
were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted,
not only to the stars but in the face of the sun.  Take for example
the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires of Mexico
and Peru.  They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China and
only less lively than that central civilisation which is our own.
But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always
their own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing
their legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going
out of their way to idealise its victims.  They always assume
that before the advent of Europe there was nothing anywhere
but Eden.  And Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations
in 'Songs before Sunrise,' used an expression about Spain in her
South American conquests which always struck me as very strange.
He said something about 'her sins and sons through sinless
lands dispersed,' and how they 'made accursed the name of man
and thrice accursed the name of God.'  It may be reasonable
enough that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why
in the world should he say that the South Americans were sinless?
Why should he have supposed that continent to be exclusively
populated by archangels or saints perfect in heaven?  It would
be a strong thing to say of the most respectable neighbourhood;
but when we come to think of what we really do know of that society
the remark is rather funny.  We know that the sinless priests
of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted
as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing
but incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments.
We may note also in the mythology of this American civilisation
that element of reversal or violence against instinct of which
Dante wrote; which runs backwards everywhere through the unnatural
religion of the demons.  It is notable not only in ethics
but in aesthetics.  A South American idol was made as ugly
as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible.
They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards
against their own nature and the nature of things.
There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last,
in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests,
a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.

In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation
of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice.
It is by no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever
indulged in human sacrifice.  They were not civilised enough.
They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter and the
endless dark.  Chill penury repressed their noble rage and froze
the genial current of the soul.  It was in brighter days and broader
daylight that the noble rage is found unmistakably raging.
It was in richer and more instructed lands that the genial
current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing
goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment
by long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell.
A warmer climate and a more scientific cultivation were needed
to bring forth these blooms; to draw up towards the sun
the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that gave their gold
and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne compares
to the Hesperides.  There was at least no doubt about the dragon.

I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain
and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly
the question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome
and Carthage.  In both cases there has been a queer habit among
the English of always siding against the Europeans, and representing
the rival civilisation, in Swinburne's phrase, as sinless;
when its sins were obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven.
For Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more
highly civilised civilisation.  And Carthage also founded that
civilisation on a religion of fear, sending up everywhere the smoke
of human sacrifice.  Now it is very right to rebuke our own race
or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals.
But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races
and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals.
There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than
the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman
potentially worse than the Carthaginian.  But there is only one sense
in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse.
The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.

This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better
not to speak.  Some of them indeed might almost be named without
being known; for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent
to the innocent.  They are too inhuman even to be indecent.
But without dwelling much longer in these dark corners,
it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain anti-human
antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic.
There may be suspected as running through it everywhere,
for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood.
People would understand better the popular fury against
the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly
attributed to them was preventing the birth of children.
The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew
race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war
upon children; and it is probable enough that this abominable
apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared
in Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder;
not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism,
but by individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen
to be Jews.  This sense that the forces of evil especially
threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity
of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages.  Chaucer did but give
another version of a very national English legend, when he
conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark
alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading,
like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing
of little St. Hugh.

Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story
centered especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean,
where the nomads had turned gradually into traders and had begun
to trade with the whole world.  Indeed in the sense of trade
and travel and colonial extension, it already had something
like an empire of the whole world.  Its purple dye, the emblem
of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which were
sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails
that entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery
of Africa.  It might be said truly to have painted the map purple.
It was already a world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre
would hardly have troubled to notice that one of their princesses
had condescended to marry the chief of some tribe called Judah;
when the merchants of its African outpost would only have curled
their bearded and Semitic lips with a slight smile at the mention
of a village called Rome.  And indeed no two things could have seemed
more distant from each other, not only in space but in Spirit,
than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very
virtues of the small Italian republic.  There was but one thing
between them; and the thing which divided them has united them.
Very various and incompatible were the things that could
be loved by the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel;
but they were at one in what they hated.  It is very easy in both
cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful.
It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure
either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel
or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa.  These men
had their limitations and their local passions; but this
criticism of them is unimaginative and therefore unreal.
It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate,
facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern
and western enemies; and that something is the first subject
of this chapter.

The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above
all things practical.  It has left little in the way of art
and nothing in the way of poetry.  But it prided itself upon being
very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion
that strange and sometimes secret train of thought which we
have already noted in those who look for immediate effects.
There is always in such a mentality an idea that there is
a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would
shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness.
They believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who
delivered the goods.  In their dealings with their god Moloch,
they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods.
It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall
have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative;
it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I
have suggested, about a certain attitude towards children.
This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury
the servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all
the household gods in Rome This is what challenged two things
naturally so much divided by every sort of distance and disunion,
whose union was to save the world.

I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual
elements into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name
of The Philosophers.  I confess that it covers in my mind much
that would generally be classified otherwise; and that what are
here called philosophies are very often called religions.
I believe however that my own description will be found
to be much the more realistic and not the less respectful.
But we must first take philosophy in its purest and clearest
form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be
found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines,
that culture of the Mediterranean of which we have been considering
the mythologies and idolatries in the last two chapters.

Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan
what Catholicism is to the Catholic.  It was never a view of the
universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth
with something to say about everything.  It was only a satisfaction
of one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side;
and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side.
But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety.
All that world was a tissue of interwoven tales and cults,
and there ran in and out of it, as we have already seen,
that black thread among its more blameless colours; the darker
paganism that was really diabolism.  But we all know that this did
not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan gods.
Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood,
they turned in other moods to something totally different.
But it is very important to realise that it was totally different.
It was too different to be inconsistent.  It was so alien that it
did not clash.  While a mob of people were pouring on a public
holiday to the feast of Adonis or the games in honour of Apollo,
this or that man would prefer to stop at home and think out
a little theory about the nature of things.  Sometimes his hobby
would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God;
or even in that sense about the nature of the gods.
But he very seldom thought of pitting his nature of the gods
against the gods of nature.

It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student
of abstractions.  He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded.
His hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was
as private as if it had been numismatics or playing draughts.
And even when his wisdom came to be a public possession, and almost
a political situation, it was very seldom on the same plane
as the popular and religious institutions.  Aristotle, with his
colossal common sense, was perhaps the greatest of all philosophers;
certainly the most practical of all philosophies But Aristotle
would no more have set up the Absolute side by side with the Apollo
of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than Archimedes
would have thought of setting up the lever as a sort of idol
or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city.
Or we might as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles
triangle, or offering sacrifices to the square of the hypotenuse.
The one man meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics;
for the love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing.
But that sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with
the other sort of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate
some rascally romance about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan.
It is perhaps the proof of a certain superficiality and even
insincerity about the popular polytheism, that men could
be philosophers and even sceptics without disturbing it.
These thinkers could move the foundations of the world without
altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above
it in the air.

For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world,
even when a curious compromise seemed to prevent them from
moving the foundations of the city.  The two great philosophers
of antiquity do indeed appear to us as defenders of sane and even
of sacred ideas; their maxims often read like the answers to
sceptical questions too completely answered to be always recorded.
Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and nature-worshipping
cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a political animal.
Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism,
as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting
on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities;
that ideas exist just as men exist.  Plato however seemed
sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist;
or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict
with the ideas.  He had something of the social sentiment that we
call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city.
Like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious
as he remains, he has been the Father of all faddists.
Aristotle anticipated more fully the sacramental sanity
that was to combine the body and the soul of things;
for he considered the nature of men as well as the nature
of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light.
But though these great men were in that sense constructive
and conservative, they belonged to a world where thought was free
to the point of being fanciful.  Many other great intellects did
indeed follow them, some exalting an abstract vision of virtue,
others following more rationalistically the necessity of the human
pursuit of happiness.  The former had the name of Stoics;
and their name has passed into a proverb for what is indeed
one of the main moral ideals of mankind:  that of strengthening
the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist calamity
or even pain.  But it is admitted that a great number of
the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists.
They became a sort of professional sceptics who went
about asking uncomfortable questions, and were handsomely
paid for making themselves a nuisance to normal people.
It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such questioning quacks
that was responsible for the unpopularity of the great Socrates;
whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of
the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods.
But Socrates did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism;
certainly not as a prophet who denounced idols.  It is clear
to anyone reading between the lines that there was some notion,
right or wrong, of a purely personal influence affecting
morals and perhaps politics The general compromise remained,
whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke
or that they thought their theories a joke.  There was never
any collision in which one really destroyed the other,
and there was never any combination in which one was really
reconciled with the other.  They certainly did not work together;
if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest.
But both seemed to have accepted a sort of separation
of functions and remained parts of the same social system.
Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras;
who is significant because he stands nearest to the Oriental
mystics who must be considered in their turn.  He taught a sort
of mysticism of mathematics, that number is the ultimate reality;
but he also seems to have taught the transmigration of souls
like the Brahmins; and to have left to his followers certain
traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking very common
among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in fashionable
drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire.  But in passing
to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the east,
we may approach a rather important truth by other path.

One of the great philosophers said that it would be well
if philosophers were kings, or kings were philosophers.
He spoke as of something too good to be true; but, as a matter of fact,
it not unfrequently was true.  A certain type, perhaps too little
noticed in history, may really be called the royal philosopher.
To begin with, apart from actual royalty, it did occasionally
become possible for the sage, though he was not what we call
a religious founder, to be something like a political founder.
And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world,
will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across
the vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that
very wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat
cheaply when we talk of China.  Men have served many very strange gods;
and trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols.
China is a society that has really chosen to believe in intellect.
It has taken intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone
in the world.  From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king
and the philosopher by actually appointing a philosopher to advise
the king.  It made a public institution out of a private individual,
who had nothing in the world to do but to be intellectual.
It had and has, of course, many other things on the same pattern.
It creates all ranks and privileges by public examination;
it has nothing that we call an aristocracy; it is a democracy
dominated by an intelligensia.  But the point here is that it had
philosophers to advise kings; and one of those philosophers must
have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.

Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher;
possibly not even a religious man.  He was not an atheist;
he was apparently what we call an agnostic.  But the really vital point
is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all.
It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story
of how Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell
organised the Boy Scouts.  Confucius was not there to bring a
message from heaven to humanity, but to organise China; and he must
have organised it exceedingly well.  It follows that he dealt
much with morals; but he bound them up strictly with manners.
The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it
contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom,
is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all
its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace.
Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health,
of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea.
But he will also see that the ancestor-worship and the reverence
for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds.  It is unfair
to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder.
It is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder.
It is as unfair as going out of one's way to say that Jeremy Bentham
was not a Christian martyr.

But there is a class of most interesting cases in which
philosophers were kings, and not merely the friends of kings.
The combination is not accidental.  It has a great deal to do with
this rather elusive question of the function of the philosopher.
It contains in it some hint of why philosophy and mythology
seldom came to an open rupture.  It was not only because there
was something a little frivolous about the mythology.
It was also because there was something a little supercilious
about the philosopher.  He despised the myths, but he also
despised the mob; and thought they suited each other.  The pagan
philosopher was seldom a man of the people, at any rate in spirit;
he was seldom a democrat and often a bitter critic of democracy.
He had about him an air of aristocratic and humane leisure;
and his part was most easily played by men who happened to be
in such a position.  It was very easy and natural for a prince
or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as Hamlet
or Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream.  And from very early ages
we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals.
In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages
of the world; sitting on the primeval throne that looked
over ancient Egypt.

The most intense interest of the incident of Akenahten,
commonly called the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that
he was the one example, at any rate before Christian times,
of one of these royal philosophers who set himself to fight
popular mythology in the name of private philosophy.
Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius,
who is in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage.
Marcus Aurelius has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre
or the Christian martyrdoms.  But it was characteristic;
for this sort of man really thought of popular religion just as
he thought of popular circuses.  Of him Professor Phillimore has
profoundly said 'a great and good man--and he knew it.'  The heretic
Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and perhaps more humble.
For there is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight.
It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own
philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes
he affected a sort of coup d'etat; hurling down the high gods of Egypt
with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing
mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun.
He had other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists.
In the sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a
Little Egypter.  In art he was a realist because he was an idealist;
for realism is more impossible than any other ideal.  But after
all there falls on him something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius,
stalked by the shadow of Professor Phillimore.  That is the matter
with this noble sort of prince is that he has nowhere quite escaped
being something of a prig.  Priggishness is so pungent a smell
that it clings amid the faded spices even to an Egyptian mummy.
That was the matter with the heretic Pharaoh, as with a good many
other heretics, was that he probably never paused to ask himself
whether there was anything in the popular beliefs and tales
of people less educated than himself.  And, as already suggested,
there was something in them.  There was a real human hunger
in all that element of feature and locality, that procession
of deities like enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching
at certain haunted spots, in all the many wanderings of mythology.
Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really
looking for Osiris.  But it is true that Nature is really looking
for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural.
Something much more definite was to satisfy that need;
but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it.
The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of
popular superstitions, in which the priests rose on the shoulders
of the people and ascended the throne of the kings.

The next great example I shall take of the princely sage
is Gautama, the great Lord Buddha.  I know he is not generally
classed merely with the philosophers; but I am more and more
convinced from all information that reaches me, that this
is the real interpretation of his immense importance.
He was by far the greatest and the best of these intellectuals
born in the purple.  His reaction was perhaps the noblest and
most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination
of thinkers and of thrones.  For his reaction was renunciation.
Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony,
that even in a palace life could be lived well.  The fierier
Egyptian king concluded that it could be lived even better
after a palace revolution.  But the great Gautama was the only
one of them who proved he could really do without his palace.
One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution.
But after all there is something more absolute about abdication.
Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an
absolute monarch.  The Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury
and pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a beggar.
That is magnificent, but it is not war; that is,
it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense.
It does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar
was the life of a saint or the life of a philosopher.
It does not decide whether this great man is really to go into
the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome.  Now those who seem
to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write
most clearly and intelligently about him, convince me for one
that he was simply a philosopher who founded a successful school
of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of divus or sacred
being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific atmosphere
of all such traditions in Asia.  So that it is necessary to say
at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid border-line
that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery
of the East.

Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth
as the truisms; especially when they are really true.  We are all in
the habit of saying certain things about Asia, which are true enough
but which hardly help us because we do not understand their truth;
as that Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive.
Now it is true that Christendom is more progressive, in a sense
that has very little to do with the rather provincial notion of an
endless fuss of political improvement.  Christendom does believe,
for Christianity does believe, that man can eventually get somewhere,
here or hereafter, or in various ways according to various doctrines.
The world's desire can somehow be satisfied as desires are satisfied,
whether by a new life or an old love or some form of positive
possession and fulfilment.  For the rest, we all know there is a
rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things rise and fall;
only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable rhythm.
For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence.
It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel.
What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised
peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation,
of which the hollow hub is really nothing.  In that sense the worst
part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that forever.
That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive
or looking backwards.  That is why we see even her curved swords
as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine
ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain.
It has very little to do with the political varnish of progress;
all Asiatics might have top-hats on their heads but if they had this
spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would
vanish and come round again like the planets; not that running after
a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home.

Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort
of cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the east.
There was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant
and almost asphyxiating mythology.  Nevertheless it is possible
to have more sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore
than with some of the higher pessimism that might have withered it.
It must always be remembered, however, when all fair allowances
are made, that a great deal of spontaneous eastern imagery
really is idolatry; the local and literal worship of an idol.
This is probably not true of the ancient Brahminical system,
at least as seen by Brahmins.  But that phrase alone will remind
us of a reality of much greater moment.  This great reality is
the Caste System of ancient India.  It may have had some of the
practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe.  But it
contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every
extreme type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does
really conceive the social superiority as a spiritual superiority.
This not only divides it fundamentally from the fraternity
of Christendom, but leaves it standing like a mighty and terraced
mountain of pride between the relatively egalitarian levels
both of Islam and of China.  But the fixity of this formation
through thousands of years is another illustration of that spirit
of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial.
Now we may also presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate
with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists.  As a fact,
some of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still
more scornfully repudiate the Theosophists.  But whether
the idea is in Buddhism, or only in the birthplace of Buddhism,
or only in a tradition or a travesty of Buddhism, it is
an idea entirely proper to this principle of recurrence.
I mean of course the idea of Reincarnation.

But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea.  It is not really
a transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea.
Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks
glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give.
Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of
repeating them.  It is no more transcendental for a man to remember
what he did in Babylon before he was born than to remember
what he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head.
His successive lives need not be any more than human lives,
under whatever limitations burden human life.  It has nothing
to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil.
In other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape
from the wheel of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny
And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something
that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced
when he found, it is certainly something having the general character
of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he had to play his part.
And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher,
with a particular theory about the right intellectual
attitude towards it.

I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism
is merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely
an intellectual game such as Greek sophists played, tossing up
worlds and catching them like balls.  Perhaps a more exact statement
would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline;
which might even be called a psychological discipline.
He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow;
and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is
called desire.  It was emphatically not that we should get
what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it,
or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world.
It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it.
If once a man realised that there is really no reality,
that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at
every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible
to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist)
in a sort of ecstasy of indifference.  The Buddhists call this
beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point;
certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair.  I do not see,
for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply
as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones.
Indeed the Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living
rather than for dying.  For the rest, an intelligent Buddhist
wrote 'the explanation of popular Chinese and Japanese Buddhism
is that it is not Buddhism.'  That has doubtless ceased to be
a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere mythology.
One thing is certain; it has never become anything remotely
resembling what we call a Church.

It will appear only a jest to say that all religious
history has really been a pattern of noughts and crosses.
But I do not by noughts mean nothings, but only things that are
negative compared with the positive shape or pattern of the other.
And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence,
it is a coincidence that really does coincide.
The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0,
if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle.
The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth
is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and
recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies
and religions.  It really is a curve that in one sense
includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing.
In that sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument
is an argument in a circle.  And though the figure is but a symbol,
we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it,
the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called
the Swastika The cross is a thing at right angles pointing
boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same
thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve.
That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel.
Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols,
we must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that
produced them or selected them both in the east and the west.
The cross has become something more than a historical memory;
it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth
about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching
outwards into eternity.  It is true, and even tautological,
to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.

In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure,
does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle
that is everything and nothing.  It does escape from the circular
argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind.
Since we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put
in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis,
which says that the birds departing with his benediction
could wing their way into the infinites of the four winds
of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky;
for compared with the freedom of that flight of birds,
the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing its tail.
In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George
thrust his spear into the monster's jaws, he broke in upon
the solitude of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something
to bite besides its own tail.  But while many fancies might be used
as figures of the truth, the truth itself is abstract and absolute;
though it is not very easy to sum up except by such figures.
Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself;
to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal.
It does declare that things are really there; or in other words
that things are really things--In this Christianity is at one
with common sense; but all religious history shows that this
common sense perishes except where there is Christianity
to preserve it.

It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought
does not remain sane.  In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane.
The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety.
They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above
abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air.
It needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle
of the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down.
One of these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything
is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego.
Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be
Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is
the matter with us is our creation, in the sense of our coloured
differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till
we are again melted into one unity.  By this theory, in short,
the Creation was the Fall.  It is important historically because it
was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times
in various forms over the dim borders of Europe.  Here we can place
the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the mystic of inversion,
whom we should call a pessimist, parent of many sects and heresies;
here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster.  He has been
popularly identified with another of these too simple explanations;
the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in every atom.
He also is of the school of sages that may be called mystics; and from
the same mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous wings Mithras,
the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.

That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by the
remote Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the philosophers.
They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it,
especially when as in these eastern sages the circle became a wheel
going round and round in their heads.  But the point about them is
that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram
instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers
are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view.
They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture.
Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that
really exists outside our minds.  Sometimes the philosophy paints
the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints
it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it
exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist,
like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice.
None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions
just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion
which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate.
Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the
suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern;
he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first
time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form--and of a Face.


* * *

VII

THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics
are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed.
It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with
the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.
It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs,
therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support
him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives
of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal
of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been
the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of
Sir Willoughby Patterne.  But it is such movements that make up the story
of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all.
Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they
do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why
a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading.
Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least;
but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires
thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped
has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats
or any similar title.  But so far from the movements that make up
the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins
where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off.  It will be hard
to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling
wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable
grazing-grounds.  It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers
went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south.
And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely
adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to
be human at all but cease to be a story at all.  The outline of history is
made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man.
Economic history would not even be history.

But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact;
that men need not live for food merely because they cannot live
without food The truth is that the thing most present to the mind
of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence;
but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when
he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it.
There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood,
and that is life.  For once that he remembers exactly
what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce
his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it
is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living,
or wonders whether marriage is a failure, or is pleased
and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth,
or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man.
This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our
morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and
in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front.
It is immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants
or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of mankind.
Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on
economics must admit that economics depend on existence.
And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about existence;
not about how we can live, but about why we do.
And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide.
Turn the universe upside down in the mind and you turn all
the political economists upside down with it.  Suppose that a man
wishes to die, and the professor of political economy becomes rather
a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to live.
And all the departures and decisions that make our human past
into a story have this character of diverting the direct
course of pure economics.  As the economist may be excused
from calculating the future salary of a suicide, so he may
be excused from providing an old age pension for a martyr.
As he need not provide for the future of a martyr so he need
not provide for the family of a monk.  His plan is modified
in lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying
for his own country, by a man being a peasant and specially
loving his own land, by a man being more or less affected
by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that.
But all these come back not to an economic calculation
about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon life.
They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he looks
forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes,
upon that strange vision that we call the world.

No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.
But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing;
which may be called psychological history.  I mean the consideration
of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man;
as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official
forms or political pronouncements.  I have already touched on it
in such a case as the totem or indeed any other popular myth.
It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem;
especially when it was not called a totem.  We want to know what it
felt like.  Was it like Whittington's cat or like a witch's cat?
Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of thing
we need touching the nature of political and social relations.
We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many
common men, as sane and as selfish as we are.  What did soldiers feel
when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call
the Golden Eagle of the Legions?  What did vassals feel about those
other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord?
So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more
simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain
limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art.
So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact.
There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.

In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology
of war.  Our history is stiff with official documents,
public or private, which tell us nothing of the thing itself.
At the worst we only have the official posters, which could
not have been spontaneous precisely because they were official.
At the best we have only the secret diplomacy, which could
not have been popular precisely because it was secret.
Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgement
about the real reasons that sustained the struggle.
Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights;
governments fight about harbours or high tariffs;
governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery.
It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all.
Why do the fighters fight?  What is the psychology that
sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war?
Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion
of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force.
If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish
all the slackers And the least little touch of slacking would
lose a whole campaign in half a day.  What did men really feel
about the policy?  If it be said that they accepted the policy
from the politician, what did they feel about the politician?
If the vassals warred blindly for their prince what did those
blind men see in their prince?

There is something we all know which can only be rendered,
in an appropriate language, as realpolitik.  As a matter of fact,
it is an almost insanely unreal politik.  It is always stubbornly
and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends,
without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly
ever material to the men who fight.  In any case no man will
die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay.
Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions
at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for money.
But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics,
is beyond example crazy and incredible.  Does anybody in the world
believe that d soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off,
but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all
the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf
of Finland.'  Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says,
'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments, but it is a comfort
to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in
the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.'
Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories,
or even of all romances.  Whatever starts wars, the thing that
sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin
to religion.  It is what men feel about life and about death.
A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute;
it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote
complications that death in any case will end.  If he is sustained
by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death.
They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea.
The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it
be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance
of some strange thing that threatens it.  The first is far more
philosophical than it sounds, though we need not discuss it here.
A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed,
because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it;
just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can
hardly count all the things he would miss.  Therefore he fights
for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.
But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong.
Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy
and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic,
as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians
about the Turk.  If we say it is a difference of religion,
people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas.
We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight;
a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes
and the day.  Men can think of this difference even at the point
of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.

Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier
than policy; by hatred.  When men hung on in the darkest days
of the Great War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls
for those they loved, they were long past caring about details
of diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to surrender.
Of myself and those I knew best I can answer for the vision that made
surrender impossible.  It was the vision of the German Emperor's
face as he rode into Paris.  This is not the sentiment which some
of my idealistic friends describe as Love.  I am quite content
to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works, and to agree
that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe in hatred.
But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long introduction
has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding
of what is meant by a religious war.  There is a religious war
when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world meet;
or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet.
What is the one man's breath is the other man's poison;
and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun.
And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression,
if we would see what really happened in the Mediterranean;
when right athwart the rising of the Republic on the Tiber,
a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark with all the riddles
of Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies of imperialism,
came Carthage riding on the sea.

The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture
which we have considered under the head of mythology;
save that where the Greeks had a natural turn for the mythology,
the Latins seem to have had a real turn for religion.
Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have multiplied
them for almost opposite reasons.  It would seem sometimes
as if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards
like the boughs of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified
downward like the roots.  Perhaps it would be truer to say that
the former branches lifted themselves lightly, bearing flowers;
while the latter hung down, being heavy with fruit.
I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring them
nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards
into the morning sky.  What strikes us in the Italian cults
is their local and especially their domestic character.
We gain the impression of divinities swarming about the house
like flies; of deities clustering and clinging like bats
about the pillars or building like birds under the eaves.
We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a god
of doors and even a god of drains.  It has been suggested that all
mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular
sort of fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale,
or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the home;
like those which make chairs and tables talk like elves.
The old household gods of the Italian peasants seem to
have been great, clumsy.  wooden images, more featureless
than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker.
This religion of the home was very homely.  Of course there were
other less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology.
There were Greek deities superimposed on the Roman; there were
here and there uglier things underneath, experiments in the cruel
kind of paganism, like the Arician rite of the priest slaying
the slayer.  But these things were always potential in paganism;
they are certainly not the peculiar character of Latin paganism.
The peculiarity of that may be roughly covered by saying that
if mythology personified the forces of nature, this mythology
personified nature as transformed by the forces of man.
It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle
and not the wild things of the forest; in short the cult was
literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.

With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle
or riddle of the Latins.  With religion running through every
domestic detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems
to many the very opposite spirit; the spirit of revolt.
Imperialists and reactionaries often involve Rome as the very
model of order and obedience; but Rome was the very reverse.
The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the history
of modern Paris.  It might be called in modern language a city
built out of barricades.  It is said that the gate of Janus
was never closed because there was an eternal war without;
it is almost as true that there was an eternal revolution within.
From the first Plebeian riots to the last Servile Wars, the state
that imposed peace on the world was never really at peace.
The rulers were themselves rebels.

There is a real relation between this religion in private and this
revolution in public life.  Stories none the less heroic for being
hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide
that avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were
re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter.
The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever
have a standard or a status by which to criticise the state.
They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city;
the gods of the hearth.  That is why men are mystified in seeing
that the same nations that are thought rigid in domesticity are
also thought restless in politics, for instance the Irish and
the French.  It is worth while to dwell on this domestic point because it
is an exact example of what is meant here by the inside of history,
like the inside of houses.  Merely political histories of Rome may be
right enough in saying that this or that was a cynical or cruel act
of the Roman politicians; but the spirit that lifted Rome from beneath
was the spirit of all the Romans; and it is not a cant to call it
the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the senate to the plough.
Men of that sort had strengthened their village on every side,
had extended its victories already over Italians and even over Greeks,
when they found themselves confronted with a war that changed the world.
I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.

There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city
that bore the name of the New Town.  It was already much older,
more powerful, and more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still
remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate.
It had been called new because it was a colony like New York or
New Zealand.  It was an outpost or settlement of the energy and expansion
of the great commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon.  There was a note of the
new countries and colonies about it, a confident and commercial outlook.
It was fond of saying things that rang with a certain metallic assurance;
as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the leave of the
New Town.  For it depended almost entirely on the greatness of its ships,
as did the two great ports and markets from which its people came.
It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for trade and
considerable experience of travel.  It brought other things as well.

In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the
psychology that lies behind a certain type of religion.
There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results,
apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror
and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending
the Gods.  There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker
powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it.
In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort
of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions.
In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the
parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore
the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other
deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord.  The Romans did not at
first quite know what to call him or what to make of him;
they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman
origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children.
But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive.
They were members of a mature and polished civilisation,
abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far
more civilised than the Romans.  And Moloch was not a myth;
or at any rate his meal was not a myth.  These highly civilised
people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their
empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace.
We can only realise the combination by imagining a number of
Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers,
going to church every Sunday at eleven o'clock to see
a baby roasted alive.

The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be
followed in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely
political or commercial.  The Punic Wars looked at one time
as if they would never end; and it is not easy to say when they
ever began.  The Greeks and the Sicilians had already been
fighting vaguely on the European side against the African city.
Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily.  Carthage had
also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and Sicily
the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed;
if the Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed.
Yet the interest of the story really consists in the fact
that Rome was crushed.  If there had not been certain moral
elements as well as the material elements, the story would
have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had ended.
It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace.
But it was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace
with that sort of people It is common enough to blame the Roman
for his Delenda est Carthago; Carthage must be destroyed.
It is commoner to forget that, to all appearance, Rome itself
was destroyed.  The sacred savour that hung round Rome for ever,
it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly because she
had risen suddenly from the dead.  Carthage was an aristocracy,
as are most of such mercantile states.  The pressure of
the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible.
For such aristocracies never permit personal government,
which is perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent.
But genius can turn up anywhere, even in a governing class.
As if to make the world's supreme test as terrible as possible,
it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage should
produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all
the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere.
At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned that Italy itself,
by a military miracle, was invaded from the north.
Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue,
had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry
solitudes of the Alps; and pointed southward to the city
which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods to destroy

Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed
to war with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician.
Two great armies sank to right and left of him into the swamps
of the Trebia; more and more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool
of Cannae; more and more went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch.
The supreme sign of all disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after
tribe against the falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable
enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their
great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed
like a pageant of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth
like marching mountains and the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric
panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the brown Numidians
on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like hawks,
and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and miscellaneous peoples;
and the grace of Baal went before them.

The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it
brought forth unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with
the head of an elephant or that stars fell down like hailstones,
had a far more philosophical grasp of what had really
happened than the modern historian who can see nothing in it
but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in commerce.
Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot,
as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere
entering their own like a fog or a foul savour.  It was no mere
military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry,
that filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature
herself becoming unnatural.  It was Moloch upon the mountain
of the Latins, looking with his appalling face across the plain;
it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with his feet of stone;
it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing veils,
whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate.
The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines,
were some thing more than actual; they were allegorical.
They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things,
the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far
beyond the human thing called cruelty.  The household gods bowed
low in darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went
the demons upon a wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet
of the Tramontane.  The door of the Alps was broken down;
and in no vulgar but a very solemn sense, it was Hell let loose.
The war of the gods and demons seemed already to have ended;
and the gods were dead.  The eagles were lost, the legions
were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the cold
courage of despair.

In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that
was Carthage.  There still remained the inner working of an element
strong in all successful commercial states, and the presence of a
spirit that we know.  There was still the solid sense and shrewdness
of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice
of the best financial experts; there was still business government;
there was still the broad and sane outlook of practical men
of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope.
As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end, there grew
gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they
might not hope in vain.  The plain business men of Carthage,
thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races,
saw clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead The war was over;
it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer,
and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless.
Under these circumstances, another set of broad, sound business
principles remained to be considered.  Wars were waged with money,
and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their hearts,
as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little
wicked because it costs money.  The time had now come for peace;
and still more for economy.  The messages sent by Hannibal from time
to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism;
there were much more important things to attend to now.
It might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash
to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal's brother and flung his head,
with Latin fury, into Hannibal's camp; and mad actions of that sort
showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause.
But even excitable Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost
cause for ever.  So argued the best financial experts; and tossed
aside more and more letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports.
So argued and acted the great Carthaginian Empire.  That meaningless
prejudice, the curse of commercial states, that stupidity is in
some way practical and that genius is in some way futile, led them
to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms,
whom the gods had given them in vain.

Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always
overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection
between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man
is dull so long as he is also mean?  Why do they vaguely think of all
chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness?  They do it
because they are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion.
For them, as for all men, the first fact is their notion of the nature
of things; their idea about what world they are living in.
And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and
therefore that the very heart of the world is evil.  They believe
that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must
be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold
and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature.
It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or talk
to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch.  But this
sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision
of Carthage.  It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin
of Carthage.  The Punic power fell because there is in this materialism
a mad indifference to real thought.  By disbelieving in the soul,
it comes to disbelieving in the mind.  Being too practical to be moral,
it denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army.
It fancies that money will fight when men will no longer fight.
So it was with the Punic merchant princes.  Their religion was a
religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful.
How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their
fortunes were hopeless?  Their religion was a religion of force
and fear; how could they understand that men can still despise fear
even when they submit to force?  Their philosophy of the world had
weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare;
how should they understand those who still wage war even when they
are weary of it?  In a word, how should they understand the mind
of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless things,
money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts?
They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained
too much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flames;
that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered,
that Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it
into Africa.  Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought
his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has
fallen since Satan.  The name of the New City remains only as a name.
There is no stone of it left upon the sand.  Another war was indeed
waged before the final destruction:  but the destruction was final.
Only men digging in its deep foundation centuries after found a heap
of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion.
For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had
followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe.
Moloch had eaten his children.

The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all.
But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated
by the dead.  Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she
rose afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost
fated and fundamentally natural.  Who does not keep in mind the agony
of horror and humiliation through which she had continued to testify
to the sanity that is the soul of Europe?  She came to stand alone
in the midst of an empire because she had once stood alone in the midst
of a ruin and a waste.  After that all men knew in their hearts that she
had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men.
And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light
and the burden of things to be.  It is not for us to guess in what manner
or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world;
but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom
would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage
instead of an empire of Rome.  We have to thank the patience of
the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least
upon human things and not inhuman.  Europe evolved into its own
vices and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page;
but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped.
Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll,
whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner,
with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children?
That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with
how far it might have gone astray.  If the Romans were ruthless,
it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival.
They remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces
of sneering men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage.  And we owe
them something if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus
exactly as men cut down the groves of Baal.  We owe it partly to their
harshness that our thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh.
If the passage from heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well
as a breach, we owe it to those who kept that heathenry human.
If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism,
and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember
the things that were and the things that might have been.
For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need
not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine.
Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered
without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness
the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods
rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio.  Deleta est Carthago.


* * *

VIII

THE END OF THE WORLD

I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under
the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious
companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods.
He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my
wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought;
in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general
atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later
and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought.
My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have
stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior
in experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were
meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess
in telling travellers' tales.  In spite of anything said against him,
I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him
through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face
and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something
of the look of Pan.  Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed
idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church;
while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and
the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more
than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient
orchards of the garden of England.  Then my companion said to me:
'Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that, I expressed
a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way,
'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity.'
Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering
above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was
not Pan but the Devil.  No mortal words can express the immense,
the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved
in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place.
For one moment I was in the mood in which men burned witches;
and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about me
like a dawn.  'Why, of course,' I said after a moment's reflection,
'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have built
the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.'
I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour.
My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was never
thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries.  I had only met him
by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead;
but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth
while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought
and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate
the name by which he was known.  It was Louis de Rougemont.

That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of
its spire, as in some old rustic, topsy-turvy tale, always comes back
into my imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins;
and calls to my aid the laughter of the giants.  Then I feel
as genially and charitably to all other scientific investigators,
higher critics, and authorities on ancient and modern religion,
as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont.  But the memory of that immense
absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep sane,
not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject
of heathen temples.  Now a great many people have talked about heathen
origins as the distinguished traveller talked about Christian origins.
Indeed a great many modern heathens have been very hard on heathenism.
A great many modern humanitarians have been very hard on the real
religion of humanity.  They have represented it as being everywhere
and from the first rooted only in these repulsive arcana; and carrying
the character of something utterly shameless and anarchical.
Now I do not believe this for a moment.  I should never dream of
thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what De Rougemont could
think about the worship of Christ.  I would never admit that there
was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that madman was able to
smell in a Kentish village.  On the contrary, it is the whole point,
even of this final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist
once more that the worst sort of paganism had already been defeated
by the best sort.  It was the best sort of paganism that conquered
the gold of Carthage.  It was the best sort of paganism that wore
the laurels of Rome.  It was the best thing the world had yet seen,
all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall
of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates.  It was the best
that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best
that began to decay.

Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew.
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good.
Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary
of joy.  It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society
no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does
not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.
We might almost say that in a society without such good things we
should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why
some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather
an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up
and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old.
But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made
by the demons on mortal society had been defeated.  But how much would
it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?

To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage
was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations
more normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage.  I am not
here concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman
statesmen acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities.
But I am concerned to contradict the notion that there was
nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike
of Greek cities.  I am not presenting these pagans as paladins
of chivalry, with a sentiment about nationalism never known
until Christian times.  But I am presenting them as men with
the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a pretence.
The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere
mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks
due to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity.
Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they
actually became unmanly by worshipping man.  If Greece led
her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but these
were things he did originally wish to conquer--ever in himself.
It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even
in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon.  When we consider
the war of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even
Greek decadence to Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that
the sincere revulsion from either need be merely pharisaical.
It is not true to human nature or to common sense.
Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and simple
in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult
of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened.
And that first impression, as has been said here so often about
first impressions, will be right.  Our cynical indifference is
an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions; the illusion
of familiarity.  It is right to conceive the more or less rustic
virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as reacting against
the very rumour of it, with complete spontaneity and sincerity.
It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser degree,
exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage.  Because it
was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they
destroyed Carthage.  But if their attitude and action was
rather destructive, in neither case need their indignation
have been mere self-righteousness covering mere selfishness.
And if anybody insists that nothing could have operated in
either case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies,
we can only tell him that there is something which he does
not understand; something which possibly he will never understand;
something which, until he does understand, he will never
understand the Latins.  That something is called democracy.
He has probably heard the word a good many times and even
used it himself; but he has no notion of what it means.
All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was an
incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the statesman
could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy;
the sort of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy.
It is precisely because of the presence of Roman democracy
that we hear so much about Roman oligarchy.  For instance,
recent historians have tried to explain the valour and victory
of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested usury which was
practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had conquered
the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money;
or the consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus
at five per cent.  But we realise the usury of the Patricians
because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians.  The rule
of the Punic merchant princes had the very soul of usury.
But there was never a Punic mob that dared to call them usurers.

Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness,
the rise of Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially
of popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly
normal and profoundly popular hatred of perversion.
Now among the Greeks a perversion had become a convention.
It is true that it had become so much of a convention,
especially a literary convention, that it was sometimes
conventionally copied by Roman literary men.  But this is one
of those complications that always arise out of conventions.
It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in
the two societies as a whole.  It is true that Virgil would once
in a way take over a theme of Theocritus; but nobody can get
the impression that Virgil was particularly fond of that theme.
The themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal
themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and patriotism
and the honour of the countryside.  And we may well pause upon
the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity;
upon his name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice
of autumn of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits
of fulfilment and its prospect of decay.  Nobody who reads even
a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral
sanity means to mankind.  Nobody can doubt his feelings when
the demons were driven in flight before the household gods.
But there are two particular points about him and his work
which are particularly important to the main thesis here.
The first is that the whole of his great patriotic epic
is in a very peculiar sense founded upon the fall of Troy;
that is upon an avowed pride in Troy although she had fallen.
In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his beloved race
and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan
tradition which runs through medieval and modern history.
We have already seen the first hint of it in the pathos
of Homer about Hector.  But Virgil turned it not merely
into a literature but into a legend.  And it was a legend
of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the defeated.
This was one of the traditions that did truly prepare
the world for the coming of Christianity and especially
of Christian chivalry.  This is what did help to sustain
civilisation through the incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and
the barbarian wars; out of which what we call chivalry was born.
It is the moral attitude of the man with his back to the wall;
and it was the wall of Troy.  All through medieval and modern
times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can
be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin
to it in Christian sentiment.  Our own countrymen, and the men
of other countries, loved to claim like Virgil that their own
nation was descended from the heroic Trojans.  All sorts
of people thought it the most superb sort of heraldry to claim
to be descended from Hector.  Nobody seems to have wanted to be
descended from Achilles.  The very fact that the Trojan name
has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last
limits of Christendom, to Ireland or the Gaelic Highlands,
while the Greek name has remained relatively rare and pedantic,
is a tribute to the same truth.  Indeed it involves
a curiosity of language almost in the nature of a joke.
The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase
about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads
of soldiers who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model.
As a matter of fact, nobody in antiquity was less given
to hectoring than Hector.  But even the bully pretending
to be a conqueror took his title from the conquered.
That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil
has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men
say that Virgil was almost a Christian.  It is almost as if two
great tools or toys of the same timber, the divine and the human,
had been in the hands of Providence; and the only thing
comparable to the Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse
of Troy.  So, in some wild allegory, pious in purpose if almost
profane in form, the Holy Child might have fought the dragon
with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.

The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument
is the particular nature of his relation to mythology;
or what may here in a special sense be called folklore,
the faiths and fancies of the populace.  Everybody knows that his
poetry at its most perfect is less concerned with the pomposity
of Olympus than with the numina of natural and agricultural life.
Everyone knows where Virgil looked for the causes of things.
He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic allegories
of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood
of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest.
He is perhaps most himself in some passages of the Eclogues,
in which he has perpetuated for ever the great legend
of Arcadia and the shepherds.  Here again it is easy enough
to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things
that happen to separate his literary convention from ours.
There is nothing more artificial than the cry of
artificiality as directed against the old pastoral poetry.
We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by looking
at the externals of what they wrote.  People have been so much
amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess was made
of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all.
They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a
figure in an opera that they have not asked even how he came
to go to the opera, or how he strayed on to the stage.

In short, one have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess
and not a china shopkeeper.  Why were not mantelpieces adorned
with figures of city merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters
wrought in iron or gold speculators in gold?  Why did the opera
exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a Merry Politician?  Why was
there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting upon pointed toes?
Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity have always
told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions
of complex cities were less really healthy and happy than
the customs of the countryside.  So it is with the eternity
of the Eclogues.  A modern poet did indeed write things called
Fleet Street Eclogues, in which poets took the place of the shepherds.
But nobody has yet written anything called Wall Street Eclogues,
in which millionaires should take the place of the poets.
And the reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent
yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that sort
of yearning for that sort of complexity.  The key to the mystery
of the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry.
Those who do not believe it are simply those who do not know
anything about him, and therefore do not know which are his times
for merriment.  Those who do not believe in the shepherd's
feast or song are merely ignorant of the shepherd's calendar.
The real shepherd is indeed very different from the ideal shepherd,
but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the root
of the ideal.  It needs a truth to make a tradition.
It needs a tradition to make a convention.  Pastoral poetry is
certainly often a convention, especially in a social decline.
It was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses
lounged about the gardens of Versailles.  It was also in a social
decline that shepherds and shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance
through the most faded imitations of Virgil.  But that is no reason
for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life.
It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is
the same as the word Peasant.  We may say that this art is
only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial.
On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure
of nature-worship, or the love of the natural

For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying.
Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name
of mythology.  But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been
a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic
religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness.
Only as the whole society grew in age and experience, there began
to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter
under that name.  This religion was not quite a religion.
In other words, this religion was not quite a reality.
It was the young world's riot with images and ideas like a young
man's riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral
as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time.
Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent.
It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered
artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled.
The family trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle
rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demi-gods seemed
like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald
than by a poet.  But it is needless to say that it was not only
in the artistic sense that these things had grown more anarchic.
There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower
of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship,
however natural it may seem.  I have said that I do not believe
that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion;
I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore.
I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism.
But I do believe that mythology must end in it.  I am quite certain
that mythology did end in it.  Moreover, not only did the poetry
grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible.
Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of
the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome,
swarming like flies on a dung heap.  The psychology of it is really
human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing
history from the inside There comes an hour in the afternoon
when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being
a robber or a Red Indian.  It is then that he torments the cat.
There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation
when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending
that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man.
The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere;
it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form
of the tendency to increase the dose.  Men seek stranger sins
or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense.
They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason.
They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives
of the priests of Baal.  They are walking in their sleep and try
to wake themselves up with nightmares.

At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs
and dances sound fainter and fainter in the forest.
For one thing the peasant civilisation was fading, or had already
faded from the whole countryside.  The Empire at the end was
organised more and more on that servile system which generally
goes with the boast of organisation, indeed it was almost as
senile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry.
It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry
became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread
and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent
upon doles and cinemas.  In this as in many other respects
the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even
to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age.
But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially
the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits.
The heat had gone out of it with its household gods, who went
along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest.
The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying.
It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born.
It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ
was born because Pan was already dead.  A void was made by
the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have
asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology.
But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not
have lasted like a theology in any case.  Theology is thought,
whether we agree with it or not.  Mythology was never thought,
and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it.
It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could
not be recovered.  Men not only ceased to believe in the gods,
but they realised that they had never believed in them.
They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars.
They had played the flute; they had played the fool.

So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe
sound sadly from the beechen grove.  In the great Virgilian
poems there is already something of the sadness; but the loves
and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which
Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe parve puer
risu cognoscere matrem.  But with them as with us, the human
family itself began to break down under servile organisation
and the herding of the towns.  The urban mob became enlightened;
that is it lost the mental energy that could create myths.
All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people
mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators.
And meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual
aristocracy of antiquity that had been walking about and talking
at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras.  They began
to betray to the world the fact that they were walking
in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again.
Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore.
That unnatural simplification of everything into one system
or another, which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher,
revealed at once its finality and its futility.  Everything was
virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or
everything was good or everything was bad; anyhow, everything was
everything and there was no more to be said; so they said it.
Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists;
that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles.
It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn
not only into a sophist but into a magician.  A touch of oriental
occultism is very much appreciated in the best houses.
As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may
as well also be a conjurer.

Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world;
and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the
discovery of the other continents.  But this is an illusion,
one of the many illusions of materialism.  The limits that paganism
had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence;
at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else.
The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism.
The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about
recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian.
In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already
got rather too much of them from the East.  The Syncretists were
as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same.
And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by
extending geography?  It can hardly be proposed that they should learn
a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas
of Peru.  All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism.
It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised
as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest.
A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics
across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal
amphitheatres and aqueducts.  Man could do no more.

For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one
king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger.
It was no such good news as the news of invasion and conquest.
There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also
nothing left that could improve it.  It was the strongest thing that
was growing weak.  It was the best thing that was going to the bad.
It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilisations
had met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it
was already universal with a stale and sterile universality.
The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough.
The empires had gone into partnership and they were still bankrupt.
No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything
except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen
to its highest, seeming to touch the stars.  But the wave was
already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.

That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has
already been analysed had thus both of them been drained most
literally to the dregs.  If with the multiplication of magic
the third department, which we have called the demons, was even
increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive.
There remains only the fourth element or rather the first;
that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first.
I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression
that the universe after all has one origin and one aim;
and because it has an aim must have an author.
What became of this great truth in the background of men's minds,
at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine.
Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly
as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away;
and great men among them did much even to the last to lay
the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world.
The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously
behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely
characteristic of the society and the situation that some
fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies,
actually embraced Judaism.  But in the case of many others
I fancy there entered at this point a new negation.
Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism
is abnormality.  It is not merely the denial of a dogma.
It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense
that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.
Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute
Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance
of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos.
But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy,
that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision.
It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men
shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best
work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp.
They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a
creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest
and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight.
They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars;
and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed
under a sort of gradual deluge.  To men in that mood there
was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable.
Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if
behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality
might have sustained things as they sank.  There was no God;
if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He
would have moved and saved the world.

The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry
and even with dreary festivity.  It was the end of the world,
and the worst of it was that it need never end.  A convenient
compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths
and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship
freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks
to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under
his official title of Divus.  Naturally there was no difficulty
about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realised
that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere.
The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed
to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why.
The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse
irritation out of proportion to its insignificance.
It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of
course it sounded queer enough.  They seemed to be saying
that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die.
This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair
of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing.
They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason
that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood.
According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all;
there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort
of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun
turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence
breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun.
But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid
any particular attention; people in that world had seen
queer religions enough to fill a madhouse.  It was something
in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation.
They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor
and unimportant people; but their formation was military;
they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was
really a part of their little system; and about what they said.
However mildly, there was a ring like iron.  Men used to many
mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery,
except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said.
All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple
matter of the Emperor's statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men.
It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth;
it was a difference of substance to the touch.  Those who touched
their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream,
the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence.
Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were
palpably present.  They were important enough to be ignored.
People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them.
We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts
away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a
great space like lepers.  The scene changes again and the great
space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud
of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down
towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them.
New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought
good news.  That sad and weary society seems almost to find
a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution.
Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost
its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally
still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them.
And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has
never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group
like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through
the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound
it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light
or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated
and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more
illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable;
the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

* * *

PART II

ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

* * *


THE GOD IN THE CAVE

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which
popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical
discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals.  The second
half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world,
also begins in a cave.  There is even a shadow of such a fancy
in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used
as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem;
who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night.
It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle
when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces;
and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar
under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born.
But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical
in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd.
God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures,
curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures
that he made had come to life.

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end,
has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands
that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads
of the cattle.  Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest,
all the literature of our faith is founded.  It is at least like a jest
in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see.
He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly
and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable
something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something
that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true.
When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local
infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in,
sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns,
carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may
be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention
to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems
to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke.  But about this
contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it
is relevant to the whole thesis of this book.  The sort of modern
critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance
of education in life and the importance of psychology in education.
That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions
fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous
if a child's visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog
or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle.
Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is
exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up
as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist.
The difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures,
and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination
of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind.
It is not merely a theological difference.  It is a psychological
difference which can outlast any theologies.  It really is,
as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable.
Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas
has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association
in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard
as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown
strength that sustains the stars.  His instincts and imagination
can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need
of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of
religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint
of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name
of God.  But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined.
They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman,
even for Aristotle or Confucius.  It is no more inevitable to connect
God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten.
It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians,
because we are psychological Christians even when we are not
theological ones.  In other words, this combination of ideas
has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature.
There is really a difference between the man who knows it and
the man who does not.  It may not be a difference of moral worth,
for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights;
but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights,
the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope.
Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely
make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn
into a platitude.  It is not unreasonable to call it unique.
Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.

Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence
for the humanisation of Christendom.  If the world wanted
what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity,
it would probably select Christmas.  Yet it is obviously
bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect
(I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why);
the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin.  When I was a boy a more
Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church
representing the Virgin and Child.  After much controversy,
they compromised by taking away the Child.  One would think that
this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother
was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon.
But the practical difficulty is also a parable.  You cannot chip away
the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child.
You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you
cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all.
Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child
in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother.
You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot
in common human life approach the child except through the mother.
If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other
idea follows as it is followed in history.  We must either
leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ,
or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture,
that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes
not to mingle and cross.

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing
had happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills
except that the whole universe had been turned inside out.
I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned
outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest.
The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging
eyes that makes so much of the coloured Catholic imagery like a
peacock's tail.  But it is true in a sense that God who had been only
a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small.
It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead
of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal.
The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things.
But its traditions in art and literature and popular fable have quite
sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox
of the divine being in the cradle.  Perhaps they have not so clearly
emphasised the significance of the divine being in the cave.
Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasised
the cave.  It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has
been represented in every possible setting of time and country,
of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly happy and
admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different
according to their different individual traditions and tastes.
But while all have realised that it was a stable, not so many have
realised that it was a cave.  Some critics have even been so silly
as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable
and the cave; in which case they cannot know much about caves or
stables in Palestine.  As they see differences that are not there,
it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are there.
When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being
born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out
of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon comparative religion.
There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a
story in the sense of a lie.  And the notion of a hero appearing,
like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother,
is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born
like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother.
Whichever ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they
are contrary ideals.  It is as stupid to connect them because they
both contain a substance called stone as to identify the punishment
of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both
contain a substance called water.  Whether as a myth or a mystery,
Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks
primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless.
Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been
so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities
that surrounded the first Christmas.

And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that
new world.  It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension.
Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower
than the world.  The first act of the divine drama was enacted,
not only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark
and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea
very difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression.
It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life.
Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic
and decorative medieval art.  But the more the artists learned
of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once
the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills,
and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills.
Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic
expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled
about the streets a theatre with three stages one above the other,
with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth.
But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.

There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned
upside down.  It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate,
or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity
born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception
of law and its duties to the poor and outcast.  It is profoundly
true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves.
There could be and were people bearing that legal title,
until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could
be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state
of keeping it a servile state.  Individuals became important,
in a sense in which no instruments can be important.  A man could
not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man's end.
All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly
attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds
who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven.
But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented
by the shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed;
and which is more directly relevant here.

Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition,
had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies.
It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill
from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilisation, the need
we have already considered; the images that were adventures
of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search;
the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human
in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places.
They had best understood that the soul of a landscape
is a story and the soul of a story is a personality.
But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really
irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant;
even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out
of house and home.  Upon all such peasantries everywhere
there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment,
in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought.
Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest.
Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep.
And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end
and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was
one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness
of the mountains.  The shepherds had found their Shepherd.

And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought.
The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been
wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation
and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.
And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun
being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about
the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone,
was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis
of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round
the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions
or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those who were spinning
thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism
of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras.  The place that
the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic,
it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained
or explained away.  It was a place of dreams come true.
Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world.
Mythology is a search.

We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story,
in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds
the costumes, the language, and the landscape of the separate
English and European countrysides.  We all know that one
shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of
driving his sheep from Conway towards Clyde.  Most of us know
by this time how true is that error, how wise, how artistic,
how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism.
But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity
have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is
sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic.
I fear that many modern critics will see only a faded classicism
in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived
the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds
of Virgil.  Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning
their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one
of the most important links in human history.  Virgil, as we
have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism
that had over-thrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice;
but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane
heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem
to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution.
If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being
demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane.
But if it had grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen,
except what did happen?  Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian
shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen.
One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what
did happen.  But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental
diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy
with the great event; and even in their own human phrases
the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once
have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy `Incipe,
parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem' They might have found
in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions
of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol
standing up for ever for the pillar of the human family;
a household god.  But they and all the other mythologists
would be justified in rejoicings that the event had fulfilled
not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology.
Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being
as carnal as the Incarnation.  But something of the ancient voice
that was supposed to have rung through the graves, it could
cry again, 'We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.'
So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been
beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers.
But the philosophers had also heard.

It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they
came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings
and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians.
That truth that is tradition his wisely remembered them almost
as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and
melodious names; Melchior.  Caspar, Balthazar.  But there came
with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars
in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong
if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages.
They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really
been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato.  They were those who sought
not tales but the truth of things, and since their thirst for truth
was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward.
But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand
that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was
the completion of the incomplete.

Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men
did come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true
in their own traditions and right in their own reasoning.
Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the
very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a
new renunciation, of stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty.
These learned men would still have the right to say, or rather
a new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching.
But after all these learned men would have come to learn.
They would have come to complete their conceptions with something
they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect
universe with something they might once have contradicted.
Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person.
Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship
to worship a child.

We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos;
that it was larger than the old cosmos.  In that sense
Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been
before Christ.  It included things that had not been there;
it also included the things that had been there.  The point
happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety,
but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs.
Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a
gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents.
But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him
does introduce an idea that is not Confucian.  The infant Christ
is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him
in an immortal infancy.  I do not know what Confucius would
have done with the Bambino had it come to life in his arms as it
did in the arms of St. Francis.  But this is true in relation
to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge
of the Church.  The Church contains what the world does not contain.
Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life.
That every other single system is narrow and insufficient
compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast;
it is a real fact and a real dilemma.  Where is the Holy child
amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady
of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels?
Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of
the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword?
What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism,
he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism
of Christianity?  Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle,
at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of
something added.  Aquinas could understand the most logical parts
of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood
the most mystical parts of Aquinas.  Even where we can hardly
call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger.
But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement
we may turn.  How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among
the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the
Manchester School?  Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern
and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian.  How would St. Joan
of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among
the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists?
Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching
peace and preventing wars.  It is the same with all the modern
attempts at Syncretism.  They are never able to make something
larger than the Creed without leaving something out.  I do not mean
leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn
or the boy's tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field.
The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon
for pantheists.  They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion
of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs.
Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years
before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited
to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter,
of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon.  It was the refusal
of the Christians that was the turning-point of history.
If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would
have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot.
They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in
that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other
myths and mysteries were already melting.  It was an awful and an
appalling escape.  Nobody understands the nature of the Church,
or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity,
who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died
of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism
and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and
even as finding something unexpected.  That tense sense of crisis
which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every
Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery.
The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery.
For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and
the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects
both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional.
But the wise Men must be seeking wisdom, and for them there
must be a light also in the intellect.  And this is the light;
that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic.
The philosophy of the Church is universal.  The philosophy of the
philosophers was not universal.  Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle
stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave,
they would have known that their own light was not universal.
It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already.
Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search.
It is the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional
majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings;
the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this
is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space.
The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human
triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their
calculations about it.  For it is the paradox of that group in the cave,
that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity,
our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity.
And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child
who was a father and the mother who was a child.

We might well be content to say that mythology had come with
the shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and that it
only remained for them to combine in the recognisation of religion.
But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that
religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation.
There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that
had rotted the legends with lust and frozen theories into atheism,
but which answered the direct challenge with something of that more
direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons.
In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation
of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman
of its human sacrifice, I have said less of its incorrect and secret
penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological
imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity.
But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt
in the drama of Bethlehem.  A ruler under the Roman suzerainty,
probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order
though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt
stirring within him the spirit of strange things.  We all know
the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival,
remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and
ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace.
Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted
its place in the story of the strange religions of men.
Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast
with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered
and superficially civilised world.  Only, as the purpose in his
dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean,
a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great grey ghost
that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome
of night and hovering for the last time over history, that vast
and fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his
last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem.  The demons also,
in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.

Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not
only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point
of Christmas.  Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing,
and in one sense even a simple thing.  But like all the truths
of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing.
Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes;
of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear,
but also of vigilance and of drama.  It is not only an occasion
for the peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers;
it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is
only a Scandinavian winter feast.  There is something defiant
in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight
sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won.
All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas
atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering
fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that
one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago.
But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle
or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace.
By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were
rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw's den; properly understood
it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a
dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber
was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were
already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky.
It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense
have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ.  It is
also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a
piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory.
There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world;
of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod
the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed
with his swaying palace.

That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave It is
already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell
under the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under
the earth And there follows in this strange story the idea of an
upheaval of heaven.  That is the paradox of the whole position;
that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below.
Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion.
Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps
especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality
as a revolution against the prince of the world.
This sense that the world had been conquered by the great usurper,
and was in his possession, has been much deplored or derided
by those optimists who identify enlightenment with ease.
But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful
danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new.
It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it
raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt.
Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded
into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high
places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ
was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs.
In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution;
the sense of something despised and of something feared The cave
in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are
swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place
of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure.
In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even
remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them.
We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the
treatment of the early Church.  It was important while it was
still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent.
It was important solely because it was intolerable;
and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable
because it was intolerant.  It was resented, because, in its own
still and almost secret way, it had declared war.  It had risen
out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism.
It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble;
but it contemplated a world without it.  It dared to look
right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass.
Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with
firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer
to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns
who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society,
being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had
a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they
were meek and mild.

Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem
because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it
from the first as under persecution and fighting for its life.
For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds
simultaneously with the Christmas bells.  For those who think
the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross,
we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled;
the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle.
It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on
the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place
is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up
the Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them
are already crystallised in the first Christmas story.
They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are
nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can
make them one.  The first is the human instinct for a heaven
that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home.
It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths;
that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode
of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return
of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body.  I do not here
reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need.
I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it,
the pagans will not be satisfied.  This is present in the story
of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos
and Delphi; and as it is not present in the whole universe of
Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer.  The second
element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies;
larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that
of Herbert Spencer.  It looks at the world through a hundred
windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks
through one.  It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging
to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is
only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic.
It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all
kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware
of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal
and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself
in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety
and imagination about the varieties of life which is far
beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern
moral philosophy.  In a word, there is more in it; it finds
more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life.
Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added
since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas.  But St. Thomas Aquinas
alone would have found himself limited in the world
of Confucius or of Comte.  And the third point is this;
that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than
any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight.
While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth,
it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error.
It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind
of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things
that are fought for and against with every art of curiosity
or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting.
It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was
war in heaven.

This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types
in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other
king who warred upon the children.  It is simply not true to say
that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals.
It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters;
it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them.
Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess
to be equally military.  Islam may profess to be equally military;
it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle.
Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers
for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need
of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the consecration
of concrete things.  There are many evidences of this presence
of a spirit at once universal and unique.  One will serve here which
is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story,
no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event,
does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant
impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem.  No other birth
of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything
like Christmas.  It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal
and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated.
Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene
with the sense that he was going home.  He might admire it because
it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number
of other things in separation; but not because it was itself.
The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about
the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological
substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man.
It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness;
to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned
into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship.
It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders
to be found at the ends of the earth.  It is rather something
that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part
of our being; like that which can some times take us off our guard
in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor.
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his
own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within.
It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that
betrayed him into good.  It is not made of what the world would
call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose
strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass.
It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there
made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening
that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose;
it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive
and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country
and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds;
and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something
more human than humanity.


* * *

II

THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL

To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur
to the nature of this book.  The argument which is meant to be the
backbone of the book is of the kind called the reductio ad absurdum.
It suggests that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are
more irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis.
Thus in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal,
to show that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated
as an angel.  In the sense in which it was necessary to treat man
merely as an animal, it is necessary to treat Christ merely as a man.
I have to suspend my own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume
this limitation even in order to remove it.  I must try to imagine
what would happen to a man who did really read the story of Christ as
the story of a man; and even of a man of whom he had never heard before.
And I wish to point out that a really impartial reading of that kind
would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment
of which there is really no solution except in belief.  In this chapter,
for this reason, I shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed;
I shall exclude the very style of diction, and even of lettering,
which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person.
I am speaking as an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at
the Gospel story for the first time.

Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament
as a New Testament.  It is not at all easy to realise
the good news as new.  Both for good and evil familiarity
fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man
of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion,
can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before.
Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as
if the New Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen
from heaven.  It is simply the selection made by the authority
of the Church from a mass of early Christian literature.
But apart from any such question there is a psychological difficulty
in feeling the New Testament as new.  There is a psychological
difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they stand
and without going beyond what they intrinsically stand for.
And this difficulty must indeed be very great; for the result
of it is very curious.  The result of it is that most modern
critics and most current criticism, even popular criticism,
makes a comment that is the exact reverse of the truth.
It is so completely the reverse of the truth that one could almost
suspect that they had never read the New Testament at all.

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never
to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed
a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church
has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it
with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character.
This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth.
The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches
that is almost entirely mild and merciful.  It is the image of
Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well.
The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost
heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts.  But they
are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters.
Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church
in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering.
That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct.
The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor,
and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction
of the incredible compassion of God.  But nobody with his eyes open
can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular
machinery of the Church does seek to carry.  The popular imagery carries
a great deal to excess the sentiment of 'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.'
It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a
Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart.  As I say, while the art
may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound.
In any case there is something appalling, something that makes
the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath.
There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea
of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces
of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure
as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked
at the face of a hypocrite.  The Church can reasonably be justified
therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men;
but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn.
And the point is here that it is very much more specially and
exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed
by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first time.
A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form
quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly
of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness.
It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would
consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained.
It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly
know what they signify, of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies.
The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere,
do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them,
but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own.  The Peter whom
popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom
Christ said in forgiveness, 'Feed my lambs.'  He is not the Peter
upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that
obscure wrath, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.'  Christ lamented with
nothing but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him.
We do not know what strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led
him to sink Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom.  I am putting aside
for the moment all questions of doctrinal inferences or expositions,
orthodox or otherwise; I am simply imagining the effect on a man's mind
if he did really do what these critics are always talking about doing;
if he did really read the New Testament without reference to orthodoxy
and even without reference to doctrine.  He would find a number
of things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than
they do with the current orthodoxy.  He would find, for instance,
that if there are any descriptions that deserved to be called realistic,
they are precisely the descriptions of the supernatural.
If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may
be said to present himself eminently as a practical person,
it is in the aspect of an exorcist.  There is nothing meek and mild,
there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone
of the voice that says 'Hold thy peace and come out of him.'
It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer
or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac.
But this is only a side issue for the sake of illustration;
I am not now raising these controversies; but considering the case
of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New Testament is new.

Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely
as a human story, it is in some ways a very strange story.
I do not refer here to its tremendous and tragic culmination
or to any implications involving triumph in that tragedy.
I do not refer to what is commonly called the miraculous element;
for on that point philosophies vary and modern philosophies very
decidedly waver.  Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said
to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe
in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion
in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern.
He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians
and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first
Christian Scientists.  But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous
and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story.
There are a great many things about it which nobody would have invented,
for they are things that nobody has ever made any particular
use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained
rather as puzzles.  For instance, there is that long stretch
of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty.
It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive.
But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly
likely to invent in order to prove something; and no body so far
as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it.
It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is
nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable.
The ordinary trend of hero-worship and myth-making is much more
likely to say the precise opposite.  It is much more likely to say
(as I believe some of the gospels rejected by the Church do say)
that Jesus displayed a divine precocity and began his mission
at a miraculously early age.  And there is indeed something
strange in the thought that he who of all humanity needed least
preparation seems to have had most.  Whether it was some mode
of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow
of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth.
I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example
of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations,
quite apart from recognised religious speculations.
Now the whole story is full of these things.  It is not by any means,
as baldly presented in print, a story that it is easy to get
to the bottom of.  It is anything but what these people talk
of as a simple Gospel.  Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel
that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism.
As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle
and the Church that is the answer.  But whatever be the answer,
the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.

First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes.
If he had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority
of ancient philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate
the unique importance of saying that he did not find platitudes.
It is more than can be said even of Plato.  It is much more than can
be said of Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius
of Tyana.  And it is immeasurably more than can be said of most of
the agnostic moralists and the preachers of the ethical societies;
with their songs of service and their religion of brotherhood.
The morality of most moralists ancient and modern, has been one solid
and polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever.
That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary independent
outsider studying the New Testament.  He would be conscious of nothing
so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that stream.
He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like
the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a number of very
startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number
of strangely beautiful stories.  He would see some very gigantesque
figures of speech about the impossibility of threading a needle
with a camel or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the sea.
He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the difficulties
of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody indifferently as does
the sunshine or not to worry about the future any more than the birds.
He would find on the other hand some passages of almost
impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the moral
of the parable of the Unjust Steward.  Some of these things might
strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms.
For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour
of peace.  He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace.
He would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they
stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist.  He would be
told in one passage to treat a robber not with passive resistance,
but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, if the terms
be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods.
But he would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war
which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word
about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling
scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy;
indeed not a word about war at all.  There is nothing that throws
any particular light on Christ's attitude towards organised warfare,
except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers.
Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the same external
and human stand point, that he seems to have got on much better
with Romans than he did with Jews.  But the question here is a
certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text;
and we might give any number of instances of it.

The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is
very far from being a meek statement.  I mean it is not meek
in the ordinary sense of mild and moderate and inoffensive.
To justify it, it would be necessary to go very deep into
history and anticipate things undreamed of then and by many
unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical
monks reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost.
If it was a truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy.
But certainly it was not a truth in the sense of a truism.
The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a very violent statement;
in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability.
And with this we come to another important stage in the speculation.
As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only fulfilled
long afterwards.  The monasteries were the most practical
and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after
the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth.
But nobody could have known anything of the sort at the time--
unless indeed there was one who knew.  Something of the same
thing may be said about the incident of Martha and Mary;
which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the inside
by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life.
But it was not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists,
ancient and modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious.
What torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from
them to swell any slight superiority on the part of Martha;
what splendid sermons about the Joy of Service and the Gospel
of Work and the World Left Better Than We Found It, and generally
all the ten thousand platitudes that can be uttered in favour of
taking trouble--by people who need take no trouble to utter them.
If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was guarding the seed
of something more subtle, who was likely to understand it at the time?
Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa
shining above the little roof at Bethany.  It is so in another
way with that magnificent menace about bringing into the world
a sword to sunder and divide.  Nobody could have guessed then
either how it could be fulfilled or how it could be justified.
Indeed some freethinkers are still so simple as to fall into
the trap and be shocked at a phrase so deliberately defiant.
They actually complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.

But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports
as things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle
us and perhaps terrify us much more than the same things
as developed by historical Christianity.  For instance,
Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of eastern courts,
said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven.
If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could
only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth.
It is the historical religion that humanises it for us by experience
of Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy.  The mere statement standing
by itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere;
the sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan.
This is but one instance out of scores; but the moral is
that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange
and terrible than the Christ of the Church.

I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious
side of the Gospel words, not because they had not
obviously a more obvious and popular side, but because this
is the answer to a common criticism on a vital point.
The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was
a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time;
and that we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity.
The freethinker then goes on to criticise his ethics,
saying plausibly enough that men cannot turn the other cheek,
or that they must take thought for the morrow, or that
the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe.
But the Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other
cheek any more than we do, if so much.  The Jewish traders
and Roman tax-gatherers took thought for the morrow as much
as we, if not more.  We cannot pretend to be abandoning
the morality of the past for one more suited to the present.
It is certainly not the morality of another age, but it might
be of another world.

In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves.
Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us.
They are rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort
of madness, would always have struck the same sort of people as mad.
Take, for instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes.
It might very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught
things natural to a Galilean environment; but it is not.
It might rationally be expected that a man in the time of Tiberius would
have advanced a view conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not.
What he advanced was something quite different; something very difficult;
but something no more difficult now than it was then.  When, for instance,
Mahomet made his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it
was conditioned by a polygamous society.  When he allowed a man four
wives he was really doing something suited to the circumstances,
which might have been less suited to other circumstances.
Nobody will pretend that the four wives were like the four winds,
something seemingly a part of the order of nature; nobody will say
that the figure four was written for ever in stars upon the sky But
neither will anyone say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal;
that it is beyond the power of the mind of man to count up to four;
or to count the number of his wives and see whether it amounts to four.
It is a practical compromise carrying with it the character
of a particular society.  If Mahomet had been born in Acton
in the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would
instantly have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece.
As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal
arrangements suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century.
But Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest
the conditions of Palestine of the first century.  He does not suggest
anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed
long afterwards by the Catholic Church.  It was quite as difficult
for people then as for people now.  It was much more puzzling to people
then than to people now.  Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe,
and did not even understand enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea
that the man and the woman had become one sacramental substance.
We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think
it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it.
In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that
the controversy has been altered by time.  Whatever else is true,
it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth
were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time.
Exactly how suitable they we to his time is perhaps suggested in the end
of his story.

The same truth might be stated in another way by saying
that if the story be regarded as merely human and historical,
it is extraordinary how very little there is in the recorded
words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time.
I do not mean the details of a period, which even a man
of the period knows to be passing.  I mean the fundamentals
which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal.
For instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded
man who ever lived.  He founded himself entirely upon fundamentals,
which have been generally found to remain rational and solid
through all social and historical changes.  Still, he lived
in a world in which it was thought as natural to have slaves
as to have children.  And therefore he did permit himself a
serious recognition of a difference between slaves and free men.
Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery
for granted.  He did not particularly denounce slavery.
He started a movement that could exist in a world with slavery.
But he started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery.
He never used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon
the very existence of the social order in which he lived.
He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral,
including the things that Aristotle thought eternal.
By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the orbis terrarum,
another name for the world.  But he never made his morality
dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on
the existence of the world.  'Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away.'

The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations
of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations
of the critics.  He did undoubtedly believe in certain things
that one particular modern sect of materialists do not believe.
But they were not things particularly peculiar to his time.
It would be nearer the truth to say that the denial of them is
quite peculiar to our time.  Doubtless it would be nearer still
to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social importance,
in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time.
He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or in the psychic
healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born
under Augustus.  It is absurd to say that a man believed things
because he was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed
the same things if he had been an Egyptian under Tutenkamen
or an Indian under Gengis Khan.  But with this general question of
the philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere.
It is enough to say that the materialists have to prove the
impossibility of miracles against the testimony of all mankind,
not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine
under the first Roman Emperors.  What they have to prove,
for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels of
those particular prejudices of those particular provincials.
And, humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can
produce even to make a beginning of proving it.

So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage.
We may not believe in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits,
but it is quite clear that Christ believed in this sacrament
in his own way and not in any current or contemporary way.
He certainly did not get his argument against divorce from the Mosaic
law or the Roman law or the habits of the Palestinian people.
It would appear to his critics then exactly what it appears
to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma
coming from nowhere save in the sense that it came from him.
I am not at all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here is
that it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then.
It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period;
impossible at no period.  In other words, if anyone says it
is what might be expected of a man walking about in that place
at that period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more
like what might be the mysterious utterance of a being beyond man,
if he walked alive among men.

I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly
and freshly would not get the impression of what is now often meant
by a human Christ.  The merely human Christ is a made-up figure,
a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man.
Moreover there have been too many of these human Christs found
in the same story, just as there have been too many keys
to mythology found in the same stories.  Three or four separate
schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced
three or four equally rational explanations of his life.
The first rational explanation of his life was that he never lived.
And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four
different explanations, as that he was a sun-myth or a
corn-myth, or any other kind of myth that is also a monomania.
Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist gave
place to the idea that he was a human being who did exist.
In my youth it vas the fashion to say that he was merely
an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had
apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred
other Jews might not have said; as that it is a kindly thing
to be kind and an assistance to purification to be pure.
Then somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion.
Then others said he was indeed an original teacher because
he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as others said)
about nothing but Pacifism.  Then a more grimly scientific
character appeared who said that Jesus would never have been heard
of at all except for his prophecies of the end of the world.
He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming;
and created a provincial scare by announcing the exact date
of the crack of doom.  Among other variants on the same theme
was the theory that he was a spiritual healer and nothing else;
a view implied by Christian Science, which has really to expound
a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order to explain
the curing of Peter's wife's mother or the daughter of a centurion.
There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business
of diabolism and what it would call the contemporary superstition
about demoniacs, as if Christ, like a young deacon taking
his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and never got
any further.  Now, each of these explanations in itself seems
to me singularly inadequate; but taken together they do suggest
something of the very mystery which they miss.  There must surely
have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about
Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him.
If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual
healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him
as a social reformer, so satisfied that they do not even expect
him to be anything else, it looks as if he really covered
rather more ground than they could be expected to expect.
And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than they
fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils
or prophesying doom.

Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble
over something that would startle him much more than it startles us?
I have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task
of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking
forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories.
So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first
to the mere nature around him.  We should have a worse shock if we
really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time.
What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion
about a certain man?  Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody
who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane.
On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step.
Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than
a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree.
It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy,
like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac
possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than
to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence
of so catastrophic a claim.  There is more of the wisdom that is
one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness
of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds
to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice
said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder:
'Before Abraham was, I am.'


* * *

III

THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORD

In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be nowadays
a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will suppose,
I imagine, that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly be
called human.  That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and
the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more importance
in our own private lives than in anybody's historical speculations.
But the purpose of this book is to point out that something unique has
been swamped in cheap generalisations; and for that purpose it is relevant
to insist that even what was most universal was also most original.
For instance, we might take a topic which really is sympathetic to
the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently referred to are not.
The exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand;
but it was by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood.
If we wanted an example of the originality of the Gospels we could
hardly take a stronger or more startling one.  Nearly two thousand years
afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does really feel
the mystical charm of the child; we express it in romances and regrets
about childhood, in Peter Pan or The Child's Garden of verses.
And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry an anti-Christian
as Swinburne:--

 'No sign that ever was given
  To faithful or faithless eyes
  Showed ever beyond clouds riven
  So clear a paradise.

  Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven
  And blood have defiled each creed
  But if such be the kingdom of heaven
  It must be heaven indeed.'

But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually
cleared it.  The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any
such thing as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier
than a man.  It would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole
is higher or holier than a frog.  To the merely rationalistic mind,
it would sound like saying that a bud must be more beautiful than
a flower or that an unripe apple must be better than a ripe one.
In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely mystical feeling.
It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it
is the cult of virginity.  But pagan antiquity had much more idea
of the holiness of the virgin than of the holiness of the child.
For various reasons we have come nowadays to venerate children,
perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men
used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over
and above this, however, there is a great deal of real and subtle
psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into
a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus
of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon.
There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him
to the discovery.  Here Christ was indeed human; but more human
than a human being was then likely to be.  Peter Pan does not belong
to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.

Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose ourselves
thus sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is
a curious quality to which no critic seems to have done justice.
It had among other things a singular air of piling tower upon
tower by the use of the a fortiori; making a pagoda of degrees
like the seven heavens.  I have already noted that almost
inverted imaginative vision which pictured the impossible
penance of the Cities of the Plain.  There is perhaps nothing
so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these
three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field;
in which he seems first to take one small flower in his hand
and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly
expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions
full of a great name in national legend and national glory;
and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once
more with a gesture as if flinging it away ``and if God so clothes
the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven--
how much more'' It is like the building of a good Babel tower
by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand;
a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can
be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure
of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things,
on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination.
Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than
most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have
been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower.
But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative
in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me
to hint of much higher things than the modern suggestion
of the simple teaching of pastoral or communal ethics.
There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true
sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower
thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still;
of thinking on three planes at once.  There is nothing
that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see,
let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet
that the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city.
It is not by any means a faculty that commonly belongs to these
simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call
a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality.
It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell
everybody to remain at peace.  On the contrary, there is
a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency
between Christ's sayings about peace and about a sword.
It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good
peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than
a bad peace.  These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so common
as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast.
So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth
or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only
on a plane.

This quality of something that can only be called subtle
and superior, something that is capable of long views and even
of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast
to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism.
It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous
truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter.
For this is the very last character that commonly goes with
mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania
as might be involved in that claim.  This quality that can
only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course,
an evidence of divinity.  But it is an evidence of a probable
distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity.
A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man
in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from
nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding
sensationalist in religion.  Nor is it even avoided by denying
that Christ did make this claim.  Of no such man as that,
of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order,
would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it.
Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still
be true that no other historical tradition except the Church
had ever even made the same mistake.  Mahomedans did not
misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah.  Jews did
not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah.  Why was
this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made.
Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still
a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.

The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague
and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false.
There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions
are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they
are all fighting for the same starry crown.  It is quite false.
The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really
so rare as to be unique.  Mahomet did not make it any more than
Micah or Malachi.  Confucius did not make it any more that Plato
or Marcus Aurelius.  Buddha never said he was Bramah.  Zoroaster no
more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman.  The truth is that,
in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it
to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy.
It is exactly the other way.  Normally speaking, the greater
a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim.
Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man
who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man;
a secretive or self-centered monomaniac.  Nobody can imagine
Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down
from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor
like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself.
Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine;
though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a
cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works.
It is possible to find here and there human beings who make
this supremely superhuman claim.  It is possible to find them
in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats.
But what is much more important than their mere materialistic
fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and
clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this,
or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type;
narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity.  It is by rather
an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a
sense he is not cracked enough.  He is cramped rather than cracked;
there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it.
This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does
sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity.  It can be found,
not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only
among a low set of lunatics.  But this is exactly where the argument
becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much.
For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person.
No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher
of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile
that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell.
No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable
of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a
cyclops with one eye.  Upon any possible historical criticism,
he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that.
Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else
in the highest place of all.

In, fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it)
in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious
and interesting human problem.  It is so intensely interesting,
considered as a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite disinterested,
so to speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate
human problem into something like an intelligible human portrait.
If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly
complex and contradictory human character.  For he combined exactly
the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation.
He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise;
he was a good judge.  What he said was always unexpected; but it
was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate.
Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the wheat.
It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety.  It has not the
simplicity of a madman.  It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic.
It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end
of a century of Utopias.  Nothing could be less like this quality
of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition
of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain.  I really
do not see how these two characters could be convincingly combined,
except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines them.
For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact,
however marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually
further and further away from it.  Divinity is great enough
to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine.
But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so.
God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God,
and the greater he is the better he knows it.  That is the paradox;
everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding
from it.  Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing.
A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if
he were omniscient.  But Christ is in another sense omniscient
if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.

Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the Jesus
of the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note
of something superhuman; that is of something human and more than human.
But there is another quality running through all his teachings which seems
to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and that
is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach.
If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally
as grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine
for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole
crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly
be described as human.  It rises superior to all superior persons.
It is as human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens.  But even
in that story there is something else that has that note of
things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant.
I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature
of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles
at all, at least at that stage; 'my time is not yet come.'
What does that mean?  At least it certainly meant a general plan or
purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in.
And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave
out the point of the story, but the story.

We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher,
and there is a vital truth in that view in so far as it
emphasises an attitude towards luxury and convention which most
respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond.
It is expressed in his own great saying about the holes of the foxes
and the nests of the birds, and, like many of his great sayings,
it is felt as less powerful than it is, through lack of
appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own
humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human;
calling himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect,
calling himself simply Man.  It is fitting that the New Man
or the Second Adam should repeat in so ringing a voice and with
so arresting a gesture the great fact which came first in the
original story, that man differs from the brutes by everything,
even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even
less native; a stranger upon the earth.  It is well to speak
of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared
the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor.
It is assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly
have been moved on by the police and almost certainly arrested
by the police for having no visible means of subsistence.
For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which
Nero and Herod never happened to think of, that of actually
punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.

But in another sense the word 'wandering' as applied to his life is
a little misleading.  As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan
sages and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described
as wandering teachers.  In some of them their rambling journeys
were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks.
Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults
as a sort of ideal philosopher, is represented as rambling as far
as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time.
There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics;
and most even of the great philosophers give us a vague
impression of having very little to do except to walk and talk.
The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds
of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a
never-ending picnic; and especially, which is the important point,
to have neither beginning nor end.  Socrates did indeed find
the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution.
But it is the whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position
of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an incident.
We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if we miss
that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent surprise,
and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable
as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth.
He is looking for truth and not looking for death.  Death is but
a stone in the road which can trip him up.  His work in life is
to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever.
Buddha, on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture;
it was the gesture of renunciation, and therefore in a sense of denial.
But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation
that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist
was not dramatic.  Here again we miss the particular moral
importance of the great mystic if we do not see the distinction;
that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which consists
of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment.
He passes into peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it.
Henceforth his life is that of the ideal philosopher; certainly a
far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana;
but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business
to do anything but rather to explain everything; in his case,
we might almost say, mildly and softly to explore everything.
For the messages are basically different.  Christ said 'Seek
first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.'
Buddha said 'Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none
of these things.'

Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift
and straight as a thunderbolt.  It was above all things dramatic;
it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done.
It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked
about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth.
And even the external movement of it must not be described
as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey.
This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than
of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object,
like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden
apples of the Hesperides.  The gold that he was seeking was death.
The primary thing that he was going to do was to die.
He was going to do other things equally definite and objective;
we might almost say equally external and material.  But from
first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die.
No two things could possibly be more different than the death of
Socrates and the death of Christ.  We are meant to feel that the death
of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least,
a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow
of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy.
We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ
as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis.  We are meant to feel
that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death,
a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice.
From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket
to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch,
the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction
of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.

Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey,
almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner
of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom.
It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee,
a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden,
and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains
that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars,
as to a Mountain of Purgatory.  He may be met as if straying
in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion
or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city.
That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested
the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly
cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem.  Some light touch
of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent,
the patriotism stinks with vulgarity.  That is the meaning
the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the Temple,
when the tables were hurled like lumber down the steps,
and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily blows; the incident
that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the pacifists as any
paradox about non resistance can be to any of the militarists.
I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we must
never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared
to the journey of Ulysses.  It was not only a romance of travel
but a romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation.
No healthy boy reading the story regards the rout of the Ithacan
suitors as anything but a happy ending.  But there are doubtless
some who regard the rout of the Jewish merchants and money changers
with that refined repugnance which never fails to move them
in the presence of violence, and especially of violence against
the well-to-do. The point, here however, is that all these incidents
have in them a character of mounting crisis.  In other words.
these incidents are not incidental.  When Apollonius the ideal
philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat of Domitian
and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental.
It might have occurred at any time in the wandering life of
the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is doubtful in date as well as
in substance.  The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and resumed
his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period.
It is characteristic of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius
was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous old age.
Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles.
When Jesus was brought before the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate,
he did not vanish.  It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour
and the power of darkness.  It was the supremely supernatural act,
of all his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.

Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it.
The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and
eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists
and self-conscious rhetoricians.  The tale has been retold
with patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and with fluent
enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold here.
The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story
is like the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them
simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.
Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words
about such words as these?  What is the use of word-painting about
the dark garden filled suddenly with torchlight and furious faces?
'Are you come out with swords and staves as against a robber?
All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took me not.'
Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of
that irony; like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall?
'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but weep for yourselves
and for your children.'  As the High Priest asked what further
need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we
have of words.  Peter in a panic repudiated him:  'and immediately
the cock crew; and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter went out
and wept bitterly.'  Has anyone any further remarks to offer.
Just before the murder he prayed for all the murderous race
of men, saying, 'They know not what they do'; is there anything
to say to that, except that we know as little what we say?
Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy
trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in haphazard
with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution;
and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion
one voice spoke in homage, a startling voice from the very last
place where it was looked for, the gibbet of the criminal;
and he said to that nameless ruffian, 'This night shalt thou be with me
in Paradise'? Is there anything to put after that but a full stop?
Or is anyone prepared to answer adequately that farewell gesture
to all flesh which created for his Mother a new Son?

It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose,
to point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all
the human forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story.
As kings and philosophers and the popular element had been
symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically
concerned in his death; and with that we come face to face
with the essential fact to be realised.  All the great groups
that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great
historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself.
Man could do no more.  Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything
else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract.
Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest;
it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins.
But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has
been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing
originally weak.  It was emphatically the strength of the world
that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was
turned to folly.

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are
at their worst.  That is what really shows us the world at its worst.
It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers
of an international civilisation.  Rome, the legend, founded upon
fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a
heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry.
Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against
the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece.
But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome,
the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom.
Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors
of the world.  He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask:
'What is truth?'  So in that drama which decided the whole fate of
antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse
of his true role.  Rome was almost another name for responsibility.
Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible.
Man could do no more.  Even the practical had become the impracticable.
Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed
his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind
all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds.  It was the most
important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world.
Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like
seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face.
Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries
divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.
Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even conquer the world.
There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form;
but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried.
You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private
opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish
priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense.
They had kept it as a gigantic secret.  As savage heroes might have kept
the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle.  They were
proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity;
and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.  Since that
day their representatives have been like blind men in broad daylight,
striking to right and left with their staffs, and cursing the darkness.
But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it has
at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and in a
sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot satisfy.
For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy.
Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in
his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God
had left his heavens to set it right.

And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once
been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best,
or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best.
The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common
people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made
so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world,
showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world.
They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city,
and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline
of a society.  The same thing that makes the rural population
live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour.
Just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its
likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion
that is arbitrary without being authoritative.  Some brigand
or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular
figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ.  In all
this we recognise the urban population that we know, with its
newspaper scares and scoops.  But there was present in this
ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world.
We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual,
even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more
of the individual condemned.  It was the soul of the hive;
a heathen thing.  The cry of this spirit also was heard
in that hour, 'It is well that one man die for the people.'
Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to
the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit.
It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever.
It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul
of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing
as everything else was failing.  The mob went along with the
Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists.
It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests,
the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human
spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might
be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man
was rejected of men.

There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow.
There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama
that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men.
Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded
than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of
exaltation that lifted itself above the hill.  Endless expositions
have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning.
And if there be any sound that can produce a silence,
we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity;
when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully
distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never
understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him;
and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for
our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute;
and God had been forsaken of God.

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich
men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it
in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard
lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body.
There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings;
it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy
of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority
of the Caesars.  For in that second cavern the whole of that
great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was
gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried.
It was the end of a very great thing called human history;
the history that was merely human.  The mythologies and
the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes
and the sages.  In the great Roman phrase, they had lived.
But as they could only live, so they could only die;
and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak
to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away.
In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they
hardly realised that the world had died in the night.
What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation,
with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener
God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening
but the dawn.

* * *

IV

THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS

Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech;
in the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it.
The first was the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock;
the second was the symbol of the keys.  About the meaning of the former
there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly
affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects.
It is yet another example of a thing that could only fully
expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards.
And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of simple
and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described
a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of a reed.

But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been
exactly noticed.  The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art
and heraldry of Christendom; but not everyone has noted the peculiar
aptness of the allegory.  We have now reached the point in history
where something must be said of the first appearance and activities
of the Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing
could be more perfect than that ancient metaphor.  The Early Christian was
very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key.
The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key.
It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better
represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along
with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement.
As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so.
It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key
and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as
you please.  Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison
of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.

The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most
conveniently summed up under this symbol.  First, a key is above
all things a thing with a shape It is a thing that depends
entirely upon keeping its shape.  The Christian creed is above all
things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness.
That is where it differs from all that formless infinity,
Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in
the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures.
That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere
evolutionism, the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape.
A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down
with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed.
But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting
in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications,
would not be more gratified.

Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape.
A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest
difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be.
And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary.
A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not
a matter of argument.  It either fits the lock or it does not.
It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself;
or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art.
It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simple key;
it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar.
And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern,
so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern.
When people complain of the religion being so early complicated
with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world
had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes
and corners.  The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did
not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin.
It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies,
of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions.
If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace
and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had
the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum.
What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here
that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex,
indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple.
It opened the door.

There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this matter
which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies.
We have all heard people say that Christianity arose
in an age of barbarism.  They might just as well say
that Christian Science arose in an age of barbarism.
They may think Christianity was a symptom of social decay,
as I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay.
They may think Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed
a civilisation, as I think Christian Science a superstition capable
(if taken seriously) of destroying any number of civilisations.
But to say that a Christian of the fourth or fifth centuries
was a barbarian living in a barbarous time is exactly like
saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian.  And if I allowed my
constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call
her a Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie.
We may like or dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome
in the fourth century; we may like or dislike the industrial
civilisation of America in the nineteenth century; but that they
both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation no person
of commonsense could deny if he wanted to.  This is a very obvious
fact but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make
it the foundation of any further description of constructive
Christianity in the past.  For good or evil, it was pre-eminently
the product of a civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age.
This is the first fact apart from all praise or blame;
indeed I am so unfortunate as not to feel that I praise a thing
when I compare it to Christian Science.  But it is at least
desirable to know something of the savour of a society in
which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science
that connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa
with totems may for our general convenience be eliminated.
The dominant fact, not merely about the Christian religion,
but about the whole pagan civilisation, was that which
has been more than once repeated in these pages.
The Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool;
in which a number of different cults or cultures were,
as the phrase goes, pooled.  Those cities facing each other round
the circle of the lake became more and more one cosmopolitan culture.
On its legal and military side it was the Roman Empire, but it
was very many-sided. It might be called superstitious in the sense
that it contained a great number of varied superstitions;
but by no possibility can any part of it be called barbarous.

In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian
religion and the Catholic Church; and everything in the story
suggests that it was felt to be something new and strange.
Those who have tried to suggest that it evolved out of something
much milder or more ordinary have found that in this case
their evolutionary method is very difficult to apply.
They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such things
were the seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very
rapidly full-grown; and the tree is something totally different.
It is certainly a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps
the kindliness and moral beauty of the story of Bethlehem;
but it was as ritualistic as the seven-branched candlestick,
and the candles it carried were considerably more than were probably
permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the Sixth.  It might
well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the Bethlehem
tradition should object to golden or gilded ornament since
the Magi themselves brought gold, why he should dislike incense
in the church since incense was brought even to the stable.
But these are controversies that do not concern me here.
I am concerned only with the historical fact, more and more
admitted by historians, that very early in its history this
thing became visible to the civilisation of antiquity;
and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with everything
that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in
a Church.  We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other
ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time.
It was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and
idealistic movements in our time.  It had a doctrine; it had
a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation,
it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma
with authority and repudiated another with anathemas.
If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign
of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon Christ.

Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral
movement of idealists have been forced to push the period
of its perversion or disappearance further and further back.
A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the very lifetime
of St. John the Evangelist; and it is described as the first
papal aggression.  A friend of the Apostles writes of them as men
he knew and says they taught him the doctrine of the Sacrament,
and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards barbaric
blood-rites may have happened rather earlier than might be expected.
The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time was steadily growing
later and later, is now steadily growing earlier and earlier;
until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful possibility
that it might be something like what it professes to be.
The last limit of an early date for the extinction of true
Christianity has probably been found by the latest German professor
whose authority is invoked by Dean Inge.  This learned scholar
says that Pentecost was the occasion for the first founding
of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and despotic Church utterly
alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth.  This may
be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit.
What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of?
Suppose it were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say
that of the conscientious objectors.  Some say the early Christians
were Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite
ready to accept the parallel for the sake of the argument.
Tolstoy or some great preacher of peace among peasants has
been shot as a mutineer for defying conscription; and a little
while afterwards his few followers meet together in an upper room
in remembrance of him.  They never had any reason for coming
together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds
with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all
their lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace.
They are always repeating his words, revolving his problems,
trying to imitate his character.  The Pacifists meet at their
Pentecost and are possessed of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm
and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the course
of which they proceed to establish universal Conscription,
to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody going
about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling
with artillery; the proceedings concluded with the singing
of 'Boys of the Bulldog Breed' and 'Don't let them scrap
the British Navy.'  That is something like a fair parallel
to the theory of these critics; that the transition from their
idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could have been
made in the little upper room at Pentecost.  Surely anybody's
commonsense would tell him that enthusiasts who only met
through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved,
would not instantly rush away to establish everything that
he hated.  No, if the 'ecclesiastical and dogmatic system'
is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas.  If we
trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it
back to Christ.

We may begin then with these two negations.  It is nonsense
to say that the Christian faith appeared in a simple age;
in the sense of an unlettered and gullible age.  It is equally
nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing;
in the sense of a vague or childish or merely instinctive thing.
Perhaps the only point in which we could possibly say that the Church
fitted into the pagan world, is the fact that they were both not
only highly civilised but rather complicated.  They were both
emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a many-sided hole,
like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally hexagonal stopper.
In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the world.
The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across
the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once.
The Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African
and Asiatic.  In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles,
it was indeed all things to all men.  Christianity then was not
merely crude and simple and was the very reverse of the growth
of a barbaric time.  But when we come to the contrary charge,
we come to a much more plausible charge.  It is very much more tenable
that the Faith was but the final phase of the decay of civilisation,
in the sense of the excess of civilisation; that this superstition
was a sign that Rome was dying, and dying of being much too civilised.
That is an argument much better worth considering; and we will
proceed to consider it.

At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general
summary of it, in a parallel between the rise of humanity
out of nature and the rise of Christianity out of history.
I pointed out that in both cases what had gone before might
imply something coming after; but did not in the least imply
what did come after.  If a detached mind had seen certain apes it
might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have deduced
man or anything within a thousand miles of what man has done.
In short, it might have seen Pithecanthropus or the Missing Link
looming in the future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully
as we see him looming in the past.  But if it foresaw him appearing
it would also foresee him disappearing, and leaving a few faint
traces just as he has left a few faint traces; if they are traces.
To foresee that Missing Link would not be to foresee Man, or anything
like Man.  Now this earlier explanation must be kept in mind;
because it is an exact parallel to the true view of the Church;
and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally out of the
Empire in decay.

The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have predicted
that the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity.
That is, something a little like and gigantically different.
A man might very well have said, for instance, 'Pleasure has been
pursued so extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism.
Perhaps it will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves
instead of merely hanging themselves.'  Or a man might very reasonably
have said, 'If we weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be
hankering after some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion
in Persians or Hindoos.'  Or a man of the world might well have been
shrewd enough to say, 'Powerful people are picking up these fads;
some day the court will adopt one of them and it may become official.'
Or yet another and gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying,
'The world is going down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions
will return, it does not matter much which.  They will all be formless
and fugitive like dreams of the night.'

Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these prophecies
were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them.
It was the Church that escaped from them, confounded them,
and rose above them in triumph.  In so far as it was probable
that the mere nature of hedonism would produce a mere reaction
of asceticism it did produce a mere reaction of asceticism.
It was the movement called Manichean and the Church was its mortal enemy.
In so far as it would have naturally appeared at that point of history,
it did appear; it did also disappear, which was equally natural.
The mere pessimist reaction did come with the Manichees and did go
with the Manichees But the Church did not come with them or go with them;
and she had much more to do with them going than with their coming.
Or again, in so far as it was probable that even the growth
of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, it did
bring it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the heart
of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the blood of bulls.
Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion
would have come in any case but certainly there is nothing in
the world to show that it would not have passed away in any case.
Certainly an Oriental fad was something eminently fitted to
the fourth or fifth century; but that hardly explains it having
remained to the twentieth century, and still going strong.
In short, in so far as things of the kind might have been
expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then;
but it scarcely explains our more recent experiences.
And if we were still Mithraists merely because Mithraic head-dresses
and other Persian apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage
in the days of Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we
must be a little dowdy.

It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea
of official favouritism.  In so far as such favouritism shown towards
a fad was something that might have been looked for during the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire, it was something that did exist
in that Empire and did decline and fall with it.  It throws no sort
of light on the thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall;
that grew steadily while the other was declining and falling;
and which even at this moment is going forward with fearless energy,
when an other aeon has completed its cycle and another civilisation
seems almost ready to fall or to decline.

Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the early
Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she
is blamed.  In so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely
the things that she is blamed for blaming.  In so far as something
was merely a superstition, she herself condemned that superstition.
In so far as something was a mere reaction into barbarism,
she herself resisted it because it was a reaction into barbarism.
In so far as something was a fad of the fading empire, that died
and deserved to die, it was the Church alone that killed it.
The Church is reproached for being exactly what the heresy was
repressed for being The explanations of the evolutionary historians
and higher critics do really explain why Arianism and Gnosticism
and Nestorianism were born--and also why they died.  They do not
explain why the Church was born or why she has refused to die.
Above all, they do not explain why she should have made war on
the very evils she is supposed to share.

Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the principle
that if there was anything that was really a superstition
of the dying empire, it did really die with the dying empire;
and certainly was not the same as the very thing that destroyed it.
For this purpose we will take in order two or three of the most
ordinary explanations of Christian origins among the modern
critics of Christianity.  Nothing is more common, for instance,
than to find such a modern critic writing something like this:
'Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics,
a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister,
a renunciation of all life and happiness; and this was a part
of a gloomy and in human reaction against nature itself,
a hatred of the body, a horror of the material universe,
a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the self.
It came from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs
and was ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems
to feel existence itself as an evil.'

Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all quite true;
it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed
entirely to the wrong person.  It is not true of the Church; but it
is true of the heretics condemned by the Church.  It is as if one were
to write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment
of the ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy
that the whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody
made a list of the crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except
that they were all attributed to the Czar.  The early Church was indeed
very ascetic in connection with a totally different philosophy;
but the philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist
in the world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.

What really happened was this.  When the Faith first emerged into
the world, the very first thing that happened to it was that it was
caught in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out
of the East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps.
To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference,
or anything beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not
much difference so far as stinging and being stung were concerned.
The difference was that only one golden dot in all that whirring
gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives for all humanity;
to give the world honey and wax or (as was so finely said in a context
too easily forgotten) 'the two noblest things, which are sweetness
and light.'  The wasps all died that winter; and half the difficulty
is that hardly anyone knows anything about them and most people
do not know that they ever existed; so that the whole story of that
first phase of our religion is lost.  Or, to vary the metaphor,
when this movement or some other movement pierced the dyke between
the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into Europe,
it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides its own,
most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic.  They very
nearly flooded and over-whelmed the purely Christian element.  They came
mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland between
the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and which shared
with the wilder philosophers that curious crave for making fantastic
patterns of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees.
Those that are supposed to derive from the mysterious Manes are
called Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic;
they are mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist
on is the pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another
regarded the creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit.
Some of them had that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism;
the suggestion that life is a corruption of the purity of being.
Some of them suggested a purely spiritual order which had been
betrayed by the coarse and clumsy trick of making such toys as the sun
and moon and stars.  Anyhow all this dark tide out of the metaphysical
sea in the midst of Asia poured through the dykes simultaneously
with the creed of Christ; but it is the whole point of the story
that the two were not the same; that they flowed like oil and water.
That creed remained in the shape of a miracle; a river still flowing
through the sea.  And the proof of the miracle was practical once more;
it was merely that while all that sea was salt and bitter with the savour
of death, of this one stream in the midst of it a man could drink.

Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions.
It could not possibly have been preserved by anything else If
the Church had not renounced the Manicheans it might have become
merely Manichean.  If it had not renounced the Gnostics it might
have become Gnostic.  But by the very fact that it did renounce
them it proved that it was not either Gnostic or Manichean.  At any
rate it proved that something was not either Gnostic or Manichean;
and what could it be that condemned them, if it was not the original
good news of the runners from Bethlehem and the trumpet of
the Resurrection?  The early Church was ascetic, but she proved
that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists.
The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare
that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did.
The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned
as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very
proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad.
It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager
to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they
did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think
marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy.  They were ascetic because
asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world;
but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever
that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural;
that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it.
And nothing else except those anathemas could possibly have made it clear,
amid a confusion which still confuses them with their mortal enemies.
Nothing else but dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative
invention with which the pessimists were waging their war against nature;
with their Aeons and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their
sinister Sophia.  If the Church had not insisted on theology,
it would have melted into a mad mythology of the mystics, yet further
removed from reason or even from rationalism; and, above all
yet further removed from life and from the love of life.
Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology, one contradicting
everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which Pluto would
be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in which Brahma
and all that has the breath of life would be subject to Seeva,
shining with the eye of death.

That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm
for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much
more striking and not less so.  It makes all the more important
the place where the dogma drew the line.  A man might crawl
about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic.
He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored
for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was
a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic.
What was it that thus deliberately disengaged itself from
eastern asceticism by sharp definition and fierce refusal,
if it was not something with an individuality of its own;
and one that was quite different?  If the Catholics are to be
confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was not their
fault if they are.  And it is rather hard that the Catholics
should be blamed by the same critics for persecuting the heretics
and also for sympathising with the heresy.

The Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it
was not a movement at all.  It was not even merely an
ascetical movement, because it was not a movement at all.
It would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism
than the mere leader or loosener of it.  It was a thing having
its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism,
but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other
theories and types.  This is the only sense that can be made,
for instance, of the story of St. Augustine.  As long as he was
a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time,
he actually was a Manichean.  It really was quite modern
and fashionable to be a Manichean.  But when he became
a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in
pieces were the Manicheans.  The Catholic way of putting it
is that he left off being a pessimist to become an ascetic.
But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be
said that he left off being an ascetic to become a saint.
The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the things
he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church,
and had to renounce when he entered the Church.  The very fact
that St Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure
than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma.
Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics,
we can still ask, 'Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees,
if Catholicism was Manichean?'

Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise
of Christendom.  It is common enough to find another critic saying,
'Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did
not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above.
It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in
despotic states.  The Empire was really an Empire; that is,
it was really ruled by the Emperor.  One of the Emperors
happened to become a Christian.  He might just as well
have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper;
it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent
and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults.
But when he adopted it, it became the official religion
of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion
of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal
and as invincible as the Roman Empire.  It has only remained
in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it,
it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.'  This also
is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy,
to say that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy.
And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.

The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been
invented to explode this idea.  It is a very interesting history
often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is
in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion,
it actually died because it was merely an official religion;
and what destroyed it was the real religion.  Arius advanced
a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely,
in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism;
though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious
intermediary position between the divine and human.
The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and
less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class
in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion.
Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists.
And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final
form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well
settle down.  It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became
the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn
from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future,
supported it strongly.  But the sequel is still more important.
Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism
to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors
ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity;
he abandoned ever Arius and returned to Apollo.  He was a
Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large
ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings.
It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again.
The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn;
paganism was itself again; the gods returned.  It seemed
the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition.
And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere
interlude of mere superstition.  It was the end of it, in so far
as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation.
If there really was something that began with Constantine,
then it ended with Julian.

But there was something that did not end.  There had arisen
in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult
of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world.
We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant
to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world
seems to miss the whole point of it.  We might put it this way.
If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal
have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example
of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this
Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son.  On the
other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals
always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity,
untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence,
'God is Love.'  Yet the two statements are almost identical;
at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other.  The barren
dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment.
For if there be a being without beginning, existing before
all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved?
If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is
the meaning of saying He is love?  The only justification
of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own
nature there was something analogous to self-expression;
something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten.
Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate
the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love.
If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must
look for it in the Athanasian Creed.  The truth is that the trumpet
of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities
of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly
and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold
compromise of the Arians.  It was emphatically he who really
was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and
remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics.
It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against
the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  He was fighting
for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy,
in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts
to the Trinity of the Holy Family.  His dogma, if the phrase
be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time rebelled
against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded
the Church in spite of the Empire, is itself a proof that there
was something positive and personal working in the world, other than
whatever official faith the Empire chose to adopt.  This power
utterly destroyed the official faith that the Empire did adopt.
It went on its own way as it is going on its own way still.
There are any number of other examples in which is repeated precisely
the same process we have reviewed in the case of the Manichean
and the Arian.  A few centuries afterwards, for instance, the Church
had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side
of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified
deity in the religion of Islam.  Yet there are some who cannot
see what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk
as if Christianity had never been anything but a form of what they
call Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism.  Those people
must certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent
and the Cross.  If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler
morality sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom
should not have been swept into Islam.  The truth is that Islam itself
was a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is
really a Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity,
as of balance in the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity,
and that sanity the soul of civilisation.  And that is why the Church
is from the first a thing holding its own position and point
of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age.
That is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the
pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian.  It was
not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all.
It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all.
It was something that could coincide with movements and fashions,
could control them and could survive them.

So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound
their comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now
affirm that we cannot call on these great witnesses to deny.
The modern critic will say lightly enough that Christianity was
but a reaction into asceticism and anti-natural spirituality,
a dance of fakirs furious against life and love.  But Manes
the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne and cry,
'These Christians have no right to be called spiritual;
these Christians have no title to be called ascetics, they who
compromised with the curse of life and all the filth of the family.
Through them the earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and
polluted with population Theirs was no movement against nature,
or my children would have carried it to triumph; but these fools
renewed the world when I would have ended it with a gesture.'
And another critic will write that the Church was but the shadow
of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it remains
in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome.  And Arius
the deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivious 'No, indeed,
or the world would have followed my more reasonable religion.
For mine went down before demagogues and men defying Caesar;
and around my champion was the purple cloak and mine was the glory
of the eagles.  It was not for lack of these things that I failed.
And yet a third modern will maintain that the creed spread
only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men everywhere attempting
impossible things in fleeing from incredible vengeance;
a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation
will satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine
of orthodoxy.  And then there will go up against it the terrible
voice of Tertullian, saying, 'And why then was I cast out;
and why did soft hearts and heads decide against me when I
proclaimed the perdition of all sinners; and what was this power
that thwarted me when I threatened all backsliders with hell?
For none ever went up that hard road so far as I; and mine
was the Credo Quia Impossible.'  Then there is the fourth
suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society
in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit
shaking a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities
and its household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races
could after all establish their jealous God.  And Mahomet shall
answer out of the whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert,
'Who ever served the jealousy of God as I did or left him more
lonely in the sky?  Who ever paid more honour to Moses and Abraham
or won more victories over idols and the images of paganism?
And what was this thing that thrust me back with the energy
of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from Sicily
and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain?  What faith
was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class a country
crying out that my ruin was the will of God; and what hurled
great Godfrey as from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem,
and what brought great Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates
of Vienna?  I think there was more than you fancy in the religion
that has so matched itself with mine.'

Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism
are doomed to an eternal perplexity.  In their account it
is bound to appear as fanatical for nothing, and fanatical
against everything.  It is ascetical and at war with ascetics,
Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and fighting
furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation
of harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason.
And what sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions
of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of some
sixteen hundred years?  People are not amused with a puzzle
or a paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time.
I know of no explanation except that such a thing is not
unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical
for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things.
That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from
the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that
looked so like itself, refusing help from powers that seemed
so essential to its existence, sharing on its human side
all the passions of the age, yet always at the supreme moment
suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly what it
was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said;
I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain
of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God,
mature and mighty and armed for judgement and for war.


* * *

V

THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM

The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella,
has become rather a figure of fun.  He is chaffed among men
of the world for the ease with which he can be eaten by cannibals
and the narrow bigotry which makes him regard the cannibal culture
as lower than his own.  Perhaps the best part of the joke is that
the men of the world do not see that the joke is against themselves.
It is rather ridiculous to ask a man just about to be boiled
in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious feast, why he does
not regard all religions as equally friendly and fraternal.
But there is a more subtle criticism uttered against the more
old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises
too broadly about the heathen and pays too little attention to
the difference between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably
truth in this complaint, especially in the past; but it is my main
contention here that the exaggeration is all the other way at present.
It is the temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much
as theologies; as things thoroughly thought out are seriously held.
It is the temptation of the intellectuals to take much too seriously
the fine shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible
metaphysics of Asia.  Above all it is their temptation to miss
the real truth implied in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles
or Athanasius contra mundum.

If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being
a Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can
be collectively classified as heathen, he is perfectly right.
He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is
spiritually wrong.  But in the cold light of philosophy and history,
he is intellectually right.  He may not be right minded, but he is right.
He may not even have a right to be right, but he is right.
The outer world to which he brings his creed really is some thing
subject to certain generalisations covering all its varieties,
and is not merely a variety of similar creeds.  Perhaps it is in any case
too much of a temptation to pride or hypocrisy to call it heathenry.
Perhaps it could be better simply to call it humanity.
But there are certain broad characteristics of what we
call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry.
They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy
of the respect of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed
and transfigured in the substance of Christendom.  But they existed
before Christendom and they still exist outside Christendom,
as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all round a boat;
and they have as strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour
as the sea.

For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and Roman
culture say one thing about it.  They agree that in the ancient
world religion was one thing and philosophy quite another.
there was very little effort to rationalise and at the same time
to realise a real belief in the gods.  There was very little
pretense of any such real belief among the philosophers.
But neither had the passion or perhaps the power to persecute
the others save in particular and peculiar cases; and neither
the philosopher in his school nor the priest in his temple seems ever
to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering the world.
A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to think that
people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis beyond the sea;
a sage following the vegetarian rule of the Neo-Pythagoreans did not
seem to think it would universally prevail and exclude the methods
of Epictetus or Epicurus.  We may call this liberality if we like;
I am not dealing with an argument but describing an atmosphere.
All this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what neither the learned
nor the unlearned have fully realised, perhaps, is that this description
is really an exact description of all non-Christian civilisation today;
and especially of the great civilisations of the East.  Eastern paganism
really is much more all of a piece, just as ancient paganism
was much more all of a piece, than the modern critics admit.
It is a many-coloured Persian Carpet as the other was a varied
and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack right across
that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.

The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading
his religion into Asia.  Religion there is something different;
it is both more and less.  He is like a man mapping out
the sea as land; marking waves as mountains; not understanding
the nature of its peculiar permanence.  It is perfectly true
that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and high civilisation.
But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own
definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty
is conceived in terms of morality; as when we say that Ireland
is Catholic or that New England was Puritan.  The map
is not marked out in religions, in our sense of churches.
The state of mind is far more subtle, more relative, more secretive,
more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake.
The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian;
and that is precisely because he is a much nearer approach
to an envoy from western civilisation.  The Moslem in the heart
of Asia almost stands for the soul of Europe.  And as he stands
between them and Europe in the matter of space so he stands
between them and Christianity in the matter of time.
In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like
the Nestorians in Asia.  Islam, historically speaking,
is the greatest of the Eastern heresies.  It owed something
to the quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel;
but it owed more to Byzantium and the theological enthusiasm
of Christendom.  It owed something even to the Crusades.  It owed
nothing whatever to Asia.  It owed nothing to the atmosphere
of the ancient and traditional world of Asia, with its immemorial
etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering philosophies.
All that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam
as something foreign and western and warlike, piercing it
like a spear.

Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of
Asiatic religions, we should probably be reading into them
something dogmatic and ethical belonging to our own religion.
It is as if a European ignorant of the American atmosphere
were to suppose that each 'state' was a separate sovereign state
as patriotic as France or Poland; or that when a Yankee referred
fondly to his 'home town' he meant he had no other nation,
like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome.  As he would be reading
a particular sort of loyalty into America, so we are reading
a particular sort of loyalty into Asia.  There are loyalties
of other kinds; but not what men in the West mean by being
a believer, by trying to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant
or a practising Catholic.  In the intellectual world it means
something far more vague and varied by doubts and speculations.
In the moral world it means something far more loose and drifting.
A professor of Persian at one of our great universities,
so passionate a partisan of the East as practically to
profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine:
'You will never understand oriental religions, because you
always conceive religion as connected with ethics.
This kind has really nothing to do with ethics.'
We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom,
some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some eastern esoteric
saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics.
Something different, something detached and irresponsible,
tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and touches even
that of Islam.  It was very realistically caught in the
atmosphere of Hassan; and a very horrible atmosphere too.
It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of the genuine
and ancient cults of Asia.  Deeper than the depths of metaphysics,
far down in the abysses of mystical meditations under all that
solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible
and a terrible levity.  It does not really very much matter
what one does.  Either because they do not believe in a devil,
or because they do believe in a destiny, or because experience
here is everything and eternal life something totally different,
but for some reason they are totally different.  I have read
somewhere that there were three great friends famous in medieval
Persia for their unity of mind.  One became the responsible and
respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was the poet Omar,
pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of Mahomet;
the third was the Old Man of the Mountain who maddened his people
with hashish that they might murder other people with daggers.
It does not really much matter what one does.

The Sultan in Hassan would have understood all those three men;
indeed he was all those three men.  But this sort of universalist
cannot have what we call a character; it is what we call a chaos.
He cannot choose; he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope.
He is not in the same sense creating something; for creation
means rejection.  He is not, in our religious phrase, making his soul.
For our doctrine of salvation does really mean a labour like that
of a man trying to make a statue beautiful; a victory with wings.
For that there must be a final choice, for a man cannot make statues
without rejecting stone.  And there really is this ultimate unmorality
behind the metaphysics of Asia.  And the reason is that there has been
nothing through all those unthinkable ages to bring the human mind
sharply to the point; to tell it that the time has come to choose.
The mind has lived too much in eternity.  The soul has been too immortal,
in the special sense that it ignores the idea of mortal sin.
It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has
not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgement.
It is not crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had
enough of the cross.  That is what we mean when we say that Asia
is very old.  But strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia;
indeed in a sense any place is as old as any other place.
What we mean is that Europe has not merely gone on growing older.
It has been born again.

Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom.
Asia, in its vast territory, in its varied populations, in its
heights of past achievement and its depths of dark speculation,
is itself a world; and represents something of what we mean when we
speak of the world.  It is a cosmos rather than a continent.
It is the world as man has made it; and contains many of
the most wonderful things that man has made.  Therefore Asia
stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival
to Christendom.  But everywhere else where we get glimpses
of that mortal destiny, they suggest stages in the same story.
Where Asia trails away into the southern archipelagoes of the savages,
or where a darkness full of nameless shapes dwells in the heart
of Africa, or where the last survivors of lost races linger in
the cold volcano of prehistoric America, it is all the same story;
sometimes perhaps later chapters of the same story.
It is men entangled in the forest of their own mythology;
it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics.
Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions.
Monotheists have grown weary of the most wonderful of truths.
Diabolists here and there have such a hatred of heaven
and earth that they have tried to take refuge in hell.
It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall that was being
felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman decline.
We also were going down that side road; down that easy slope;
following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations
of the world.

If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems
probable that Europe would be now very much what Asia is now.
Something may be allowed for a real difference of race
and environment, visible in the ancient as in the modern world.
But after all we talk about the changeless East very largely
because it has not suffered the great change.  Paganism in its last
phase showed considerable signs of be coming equally changeless.
This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would
not arise; as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise
in Asia.  It does not mean that there would be no real mystics
or visionaries; as there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics
in Asia.  It does not mean that there would be no social codes,
as there were codes in Antiquity and are codes in Asia.  It does
not mean that there could not be good men or happy lives,
for God has given all men a conscience and conscience can give
all men a kind of peace.  But it does mean that the tone and
proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion
of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West
what they are in the changeless East.  And nobody who looks
at that changeless East honestly, and with a real sympathy,
can believe that there is anything there remotely resembling
the challenge and revolution of the Faith.

In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things
might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we
call the religions of the East.  There would still be Pythagoreans
teaching reincarnation, as there are still Hindus teaching reincarnation.
There would still be Stoics making a religion out of reason and virtue,
as there are still Confucians making a religion out of reason and virtue.
There would still be Neo-Platonists studying transcendental truths,
the meaning of which was mysterious to other people and disputed even
amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still study a transcendentalism
mysterious to others and disputed among themselves.  There would
still be intelligent Apollonians apparently worshipping the sun-god
but explaining that they were worshipping the divine principle;
just as there are still intelligent Parsees apparently worshipping
the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity.
There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there
are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert.  There would still
be crowds of people attending the popular feasts of the gods,
in pagan Europe as in pagan Asia.  There would still be crowds of gods,
local and other, for them to worship.  And there would still be a great
many more people who worshipped them than people who believed in them.
Finally there would still be a very large number of people
who did worship gods and did believe in gods; and who believed
in gods and worshipped gods simply because they were demons.
There would still be Levantines secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there
are still Thugs secretly sacrificing to Kalee.  There would still be
a great deal of magic; and a great deal of it would be black magic.
There would still be a considerable admiration of Seneca and a
considerable imitation of Nero; just as the exalted epigrams
of Confucius could coexist with the tortures of China.  And over
all that tangled forest of traditions growing wild or withering
would brood the broad silence of a singular and even nameless mood;
but the nearest name of it is nothing.  All these things, good and bad,
would have an indescribable air of being too old to die.

None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of Christendom
would bear the least likeness to Christendom.  Since the
Pythagorean Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it
the Pythagorean religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion.
As the noble maxims of Socrates would still be there, we might call
it the Socratic religion as we talk about the Confucian religion.
As the popular holiday was still marked by a mythological hymn
to Adonis, we might call it the religion of Adonis as we talk
about the religion of Juggernaut.  As literature would still
be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that mythology
a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion.
We might say that there were so many thousands or millions
of people belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting
such temples or merely living in a land full of such temples.
But if we called the last tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering
legend of Adonis by the name of a religion, then we must find
some other name for the Church of Christ.

If anybody says that philosophic maxims presented through many ages,
or mythological temples frequented by many people, are things
of the same class and category as the Church, it is enough to answer
quite simply that they are not.  Nobody thinks they are the same
when he sees them in the old civilisation of Greece and Rome;
nobody would think they were the same if that civilisation had
lasted two thousand years longer and existed at the present day;
nobody can in reason think they are the same in the parallel
pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present day.
None of these philosophies or mythologies are anything like a Church;
certainly nothing like a Church Militant.  And, as I have
shown elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved,
the exception would prove the rule.  The rule is that pre-Christian
or pagan history does not produce a Church Militant; and the exception,
or what some would call the exception, is that Islam is at least
militant if it is not Church.  And that is precisely because Islam
is the one religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore
not in that sense pagan.  Islam was a product of Christianity;
even if it was a by-product; even if it was a bad product.  It was
a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church.  It is
no more surprising that Mahomedanism had something of her fighting
spirit than that Quakerism had something of her peaceful spirit.
After Christianity there are any number of such emulations or extensions.
Before it there are none.

The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army
marching to effect a universal deliverance.  The bondage from
which the world is thus to be delivered is something that is
very well symbolised by the state of Asia as by the state of
pagan Europe.  I do not mean merely their moral or immoral state.
The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much more to say for himself
than the enlightened imagine even when he says that the heathen
are idolatrous and immoral.  A touch or two of realistic
experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion,
will reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics;
such as the practical indifference to the line between passion
and perversion.  It is not prejudice but practical experience
which says that Asia is full of demons as well as gods.
But the evil I mean is in the mind.  And it is in the mind
wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone.
It is what happens when all dreaming and thinking have come
to an end in an emptiness that is at once negation and necessity.
It sounds like an anarchy, but it is also a slavery.
It is what has been called already the wheel of Asia;
all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect or things
beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for
the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything.
And the point is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics;
it would have been true in the end of Europeans--if something
had not happened.  If the Church Militant had not been
a thing marching, all men would have been marking time.
If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all men
would have endured a slavery.

What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was hope.
Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy
was that both were really sad; in the sense that they had
not this hope even if they had touches of faith or charity.
We may call Buddhism a faith; though to us it seems more like a doubt.
We may call the Lord of Compassion a Lord of Charity,
though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity.
But those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults
must agree that in all their ages they have not covered all
their areas with that sort of practical and pugnacious hope.
In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has
been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances.
Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been
an evidence of people being in better spirits.  Europe did
very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles
of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon, or we have
seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland.  But in
the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion.
Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion.
Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile
of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness.
And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself.
Those who quarrel about it seldom even consider it in itself.
There is neither space nor place for such a full consideration here;
but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation that always
recurs and still seems to require explanation.

There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising theology,
until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is
really the dogmatic part.  If dogma is incredible, it is because it
is incredibly liberal.  If it is irrational, it can only be in
giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason.
The obvious example is that essential form of freedom which we call
free-will. It is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality
in denying his liberty.  But it is tenable that he has to affirm
a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty.
There is a sense in which we might reasonably say that if man has
a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a super-natural
power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth
to the unbegotten.  Possibly in that case a man must be a miracle;
and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order
to be a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man.
But it is absurd to forbid him to be a free man and do it
in the name of a more free religion.

But it is true in twenty other matters.  Anybody who believes at all
in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God.  But in so far
as that supremacy does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal
or illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal power is the deity
of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists.
Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it
into despotism.  It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist,
with his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law,
that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent
and moving mankind like machinery.  It is precisely the God of miracles
and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince,
receiving petitions, listening to parliaments and considering
the cases of a whole people.  I am not now arguing the rationality
of this conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it is not,
as some suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest
and most well-informed king acting differently according to the action
of those he wishes to save.  But I am here only noting the general
nature of liberality, or of free or enlarged atmosphere of action.
And in this respect it is certain that the king can only be what we call
magnanimous if he is what some call capricious.  It is the Catholic,
who has the feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered
for the living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a
free citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth.
It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have
the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan.  Indeed I believe
that the original use of the word suffragium, which we now use in
politics for a vote, was that employed in theology about a prayer.
The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living.
And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler,
we may truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well
as the whole of the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.

But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue;
of that tragedy which has created the divine comedy of our creed.
Nothing short of the extreme and strong and startling doctrine
of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect
that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea
of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier.
By making that figure merely human we make that story much less human.
We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity;
the point of the story which was quite literally the point of a spear.
It does not especially humanise the universe to say that good
and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would
be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good
soldiers may easily get killed.  It is no news that King Leonidas
is dead any more than that Queen Anne is dead; and men did not wait
for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being heroes.
But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is
generous and popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human
nature will tell us that no sufferings of the sons of men,
or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the notion
of the master suffering instead of his servants.  And this is given
by the theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity.
No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry pavilion at the base
of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that celestial chivalry
of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle.

What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma
is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true.
That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely.
Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall.
Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die.
That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say; and it is not
in the least my intention to deny that there is something to be said
for it.  They mean that the universe is itself a universal prison;
that existence itself is a limitation and a control;
and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain.
In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe
these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief.
We say not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free.
They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth.
To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such
freedom as we enjoy.  It is like believing in men with wings
to entertain the fancy of men with wills.  It is like accepting
a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe
in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer.
This is a manly and a rational negation for which I for one
shall always show respect.  But I decline to show any respect
for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel,
rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors
of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us
that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity;
and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought
and a more liberal theology.

The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation.
In other words it is a vision, and a vision received by faith;
but it is a vision of reality.  The faith consists in a conviction of
its reality.  That, for example, is the difference between a vision and
a day-dream. And that is the difference between religion and mythology.
That is the difference between faith and all that fancy-work,
quite human and more or less healthy, which we considered under
the head of mythology.  There is something in the reasonable
use of the very word vision that implies two things about it;
first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it comes only once;
and secondly that it probably comes once and for all.  A day-dream
may come every day.  A day-dream may be different every day.
It is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories
and meeting a ghost.

But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy.
It is not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a
pattern but a picture.  It is not one of those simplifications
which resolve everything into an abstract explanation;
as that everything is recurrent; or everything is relative;
or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive.
It is not a process but a story.  It has proportions,
of the sort seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular
repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it replaces them
by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing.
In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life.
For indeed it is life.  An example of what is meant here might
well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil.  It is easy
enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black,
as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more
or less accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant.
And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper,
as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away
somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny.
Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the dualists do,
that life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal,
and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black
board or of black squares on a white board.  But every man feels
in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life;
that none of these worlds is one in which he can live.
Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad
or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths
of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling
like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher,
St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Every existence, as such, is good.'
On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly
and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot
or even a blot.  He realises that optimism is morbid.
It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism.
These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out,
would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception
but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion
or yet more truly a rebellion.  He does not think that everything
is right or that every thing is wrong, or that everything
is equally right and wrong.  But he does think that right has
a right to be right and therefore a right to be there, and wrong
has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there.
It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper.
So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly;
no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and
the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy
a cosmos that it could not create.  It is a very strange story
and its proportions and its lines and colours are as arbitrary
and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture.
It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in pictures by
titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal
vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night.
But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams.
It is like life.

Another example might be found, not in the problem
of evil, but in what is called the problem of progress.
One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I
thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same.
He was confident that the alternative covered all possibilities.
He did not see that it only covered patterns and not pictures;
processes and not stories.  I asked him whether he thought
that Mr. Smith of Golder's Green got better or worse or remained
exactly the same between the age of thirty and forty.
It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on
Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on.  It had never occurred
to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to go on;
and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or
downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley,
going where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into
a church or falling down in a ditch.  The life of man is a story;
an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even
of the story of God.

The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it
is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy.
It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories;
only it is a true story.  It is a philosophy and in that sense
one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is
like life.  But above all, it is a reconciliation because it
is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories.
That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales
is something that is neglected by all the philosophies--except one.
The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding
of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it.
Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various
tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has
to pass several tests and save his soul.  In both there is
an idea of free will operating under conditions of design;
in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man
to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it.
Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is
derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies.
For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin;
and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently;
that it begins in one place and ends in another.
From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc,
from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius
with his religion of routine, there is not one of them
that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story.
There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of
the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man.
Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak,
and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance;
either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny
that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that
detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental
scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a
materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences;
or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous;
or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure.
There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such
a thing as the divine story which is also a human story;
but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist
story or a relativist story or a determinist story;
for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette,
has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs.
Every short story does truly begin with creation and end
with a last judgement.

And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at
war until Christ came.  That is why the Athenian democracy killed
Socrates out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling
sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk
in a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh
wrecked his huge idols and temples for an abstraction and why
the priests could return in triumph and trample his dynasty
under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism,
and why in every age and country outside Christendom there has
been a feud for ever between the philosopher and the priest.
It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally
the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest
is always the more popular.  For the priest told the people stories;
and the philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories.
It came into the world with the story of Christ.

And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above.
Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures
will easily see the point.  The true story of the world must
be told by somebody to somebody else.  By the very nature
of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody.  A story
has proportions, variations, surprises, particular dispositions,
which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum.
We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body
of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence;
and we could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would
get back the body of Christ, merely from being told that all things
go round and round upon the wheel of Buddha.  A man might perhaps
work out a proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid;
but he would not work out the precise legend of Eurydice without
having heard of Eurydice.  At any rate he would not be certain
how the story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated.
Still less could he guess the end of our story; or the legend
of our Orpheus rising, not defeated from, the dead.

To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul
of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy
the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been
satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together.
It met the mythological search for romance by being a story
and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.
That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character,
as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character.
But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure;
and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures;
why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be
shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun.
The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that,
if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any
other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world.
Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched
at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double;
one lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating
invariable calculations.  The picture-makers would have remained
forever painting the portrait of nobody.  The sages would have
remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing.
It was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine
embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name
is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus,
the mightiest maker of a bridge.

But even with that we return to the more specially Christian
symbol in the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys.
This is a historical and not a theological outline,
and it is not my duty here to defend in detail that theology,
but merely to point out that it could not even be justified
in design without being justified in detail--like a key.
Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt
no apologetic about why the creed should be accepted.
But in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted
and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply;
because it fits the lock, because it is like life.
It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true story.
It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the truth.
We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and
the road is open before us.  It does not imprison us in a dream
of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion.
It opens to us not only incredible heavens but what seems
to some an equally incredible earth, and makes it credible.
This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain because it
is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses.
We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key,
but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is
the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.

* * *

VI

THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH

It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history
of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which
involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere.
It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid
heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even
of a supernatural thing.  It was not like any of the other things;
and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them.
But there is a certain rather peculiar character which marked it
henceforward even down to the present moment, with a note on which this
book may well conclude.

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being
too old to die.  Christendom has had the very opposite fate.
Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them
Christianity has died.  Christianity has died many times and
risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.
But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this:
that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again;
and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion
has again been found on top.  The Faith is always converting the age,
not as an old religion but as a new religion.  This truth is hidden
from many by a convention that is too little noticed.  Curiously enough,
it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially
to detect and denounce.  They are always telling us that priests
and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation
can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is.
It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of
Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity;
and almost every man in his heart expected its end.  This fact
is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official
religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through.
Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince
or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an
ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar
or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian
the Apostate.  But there was a difference between the cases of Julius
and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career.
There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like
Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private.
But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had
come to life again.  He also found, incidentally, that there
was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again.
This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first
of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here.
Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being
the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine
might be expected to peter out.  All the ordinary stages had been
passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become
a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing;
and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it,
just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and
threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead.
But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about
the same time.  The rush of missionaries from Ireland, For instance,
has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an
old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old.
Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief
authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe
for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed
it with some humour) 'by rather slack Christians.'

Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not
in the scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find
several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance
hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only
the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long.
But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were
fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it.
This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance
to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition
from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our
own time.  But I suspect many other examples which would be worthy
of separate studies.

The Faith is not a survival.  It is not as if the Druids had
managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years.
That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe,
in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies
and philosophies could live for ever side by side.
It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this Western
world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing.
Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution
and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic.
And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended
by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back
from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol.
Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen;
and as the stone falleth so shall it lie.  There has not been
a Druidic renaissance every century or two, with the young
Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on
Salisbury Plain.  Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style
of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo
of the Baroque.  The sacred place of the Druids is safe from
the vandalism of restoration.

But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old
to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed.
The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did
get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed.
And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe,
yet which I believe to be very real and rather important.  As a ghost is
the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals
there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death.
It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable.
It withered away everything that was perishable.  If such animal parallels
were worthy of the occasion we might say that the snake shuddered and shed
a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost
only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives.  It is truer to say,
in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened;
or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.

What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of
the twelfth century; when, as it has been so finely said,
Julian stirred in his sleep?  Why did there appear so strangely early,
in the twilight of dawn after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism
as that involved in urging nominalism against realism?
For realism against nominalism was really realism against rationalism,
or something more destructive than what we call rationalism.
The answer is that just as some might have thought the Church
simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have
thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages.  The Dark Ages
ended as the Empire had ended, and the Church should have departed
with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night.
It was another of those spectral deaths or simulations of death.
I mean that if nominalism had succeeded, it would have been
as if Arianism had succeeded, it would have been the beginning
of a confession that Christianity had failed.  For nominalism
is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism.
Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages
broadened into that daylight that we call the modern world.
But what was the answer?  The answer was Aquinas in the chair
of Aristotle, taking all knowledge for his province; and tens
of thousands of lads down to the lowest ranks of peasant and serf,
living in rags and on crusts about the great colleges,
to listen to the scholastic philosophy.

What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran
round the west under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old
romance with incongruous images of Saracen knights swaggering
in Norway or the Hebrides?  Why were men in the extreme west,
such as King John if I remember rightly, accused of being
secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being secretly atheists?
Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities
about the rationalistic Arab version of Aristotle?  Authorities are
seldom alarmed like that except when it is too late.
The answer is that hundreds of people probably believed in their
hearts that Islam would conquer Christendom; that Averroes
was more rational than Anselm; that the Saracen Culture
was really, as it was superficially, a superior culture.
Here again we should probably find a whole generation,
the older generation, serve doubtful and depressed and weary.
The coming of Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism
a thousand years before its time.  To many it may have seemed
quite reasonable and quite probable and quite likely to happen.
If so, they would have been surprised at what did happen.
What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands and
thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one exultant
counter-charge, the Crusades.  It was the sons of St. Francis,
the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world;
it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was the waking
of the world.  In considering the war of the Albigensians,
we come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide
of a new philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever.
In that case the new philosophy was also a very new philosophy;
it was pessimism.  It was none the less like modern ideas
because it was as old as Asia; most modern ideas are.
It was the Gnostics returning; but why did the Gnostics return?
Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the Empire;
and should have been the end of the Church.  It was Schopenhauer
hovering over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising
from the dead; that men might have death and that they might
have it more abundantly.

It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance,
simply because the period is so much nearer to us and people know
so much more about it.  But there is more even in that example
than most people know.  Apart from the particular controversies
which I wish to reserve for a separate study, the period was
far more chaotic that those controversies commonly imply.
When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism,
and Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism,
it is often forgotten that many who perished in such persecutions
could only be described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism
or even diabolism.  That world was almost as wild as our own;
the men wandering about in it included the sort of man who says there
is no God, the sort of man who says he is himself God, the sort
of man who says something that nobody can make head or tail of.
If we could have the conversation of the age following the Renaissance,
we should probably be shocked by its shameless negations.
The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably pretty typical
of the talk in many intellectual taverns.  The transition from
Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of very
yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the same.
It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on the water,
so was Christianity walking in the air.

But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved
in detail.  We can see the fact much more clearly in the case
when the paganism of the Renaissance ended Christianity
and Christianity unaccountably began all over again.
But we can see it most clearly of all in the case which is
close to us and full of manifest and minute evidence; the case
of the great decline of religion that began about the time
of Voltaire.  For indeed it is our own case, and we ourselves
have seen the decline of that decline.  The two hundred years
since Voltaire do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth
and fifth centuries or the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In our own case we can see this oft-repeated process close at hand;
we know how completely a society can lose its fundamental religion
without abolishing its official religion; we know how men
can all become agnostics long before they abolish bishops.
And we know that also in this last ending, which really did look
to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened again;
the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old.
When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door,
he certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian,
with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin,
the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.
In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.
How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal we
can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.

A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement
and the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made
us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a surprise.
It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed
to most people like a river turning backwards from
the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains.
To have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries is to know that nearly everybody had come to take it
for granted that religion was a thing that would continually
broaden like a river, till it reached an infinite sea.
Some of them expected it to go down in a cataract of catastrophe,
most of them expected it to widen into an estuary of equality
and moderation; but all of them thought its returning on itself
a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft.  In other words,
most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be
slowly broadened down, and some advanced people thought that it
would be very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out.
All that world of Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial
and scientific liberality was perhaps more certain than any men
before or since about the direction in which the world is going.
People were so certain about the direction that they only differed
about the pace.  Many anticipated with alarm, and a few with sympathy,
a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the Archbishop of Canterbury
or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons on the lampposts.
But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the Archbishop
instead of losing his head should be looking for his mitre;
and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons
we should strengthen it to the respect due to priests.
It revolutionised their very vision of revolution; and turned
their very topsyturveydom topsyturvey.

In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going
slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was
going against the stream.  Both in fact and figure there is something
deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential reason.  A dead
thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness
of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards.  A paper boat
can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship,
but if the fairy ship sails up stream it is really rowed by the fairies.
And among the things that merely went with the tide of apparent progress
and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures
were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog's limbs wavering
in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat,
of the sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat.
But even the truly living and even life-giving things that went with
that stream did not thereby prove that they were living or life-giving.
It was this other force that was unquestionably and unaccountably alive;
the mysterious and unmeasured energy that was thrusting back the river.
That was felt to be like the movement of some great monster;
and it was none the less clearly a living monster because most people
thought it a prehistoric monster.  It was none the less an unnatural,
an incongruous, and to some a comic upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent
had suddenly risen out of the Round Pond--unless we consider the
Sea Serpent as more likely to live in the Serpentine.  This flippant
element in the fantasy must not be missed, for it was one of
the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of the reversal.
That age did really feel that a preposterous quality in prehistoric
animals belonged also to historic rituals; that mitres and tiaras were
like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and that appealing
to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive Man.

The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all because
it still moves.  I have said something elsewhere of the rather
random sort of reproaches that are still directed against it
and its much greater consequences; it is enough to say here
that the more such critics reproach it the less they explain it.
In a sense it is my concern here, if not to explain it, at least
to suggest the direction of the explanation; but above all,
it is my concern to point out one particular thing about it.
And that is that it had all happened before; and even
many times before.

To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen
an attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen
what the most remote centuries have seen.  And even the modern example
has only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended.
It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going
to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather
in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared.
It is going to end as the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts
at a compromise with Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended.
But the point to seize in the modern case, as in all the other cases
is that what returns is not in that sense a simplified theology;
not according to that view a purified theology; it is simply theology.
It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most
doctrinal ages; it is the divine science.  An old Don with D. D. after
his name may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was
because he was himself bored with his theology, not because he was
excited about it.  It was precisely because he was admittedly more
interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine,
in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom.  It was
precisely because he was more interested in a dead tradition than
in a decidedly living tradition.  In short, it was precisely because
he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak.
It was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful
and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.

There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit.
They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost.
But it is not going to remain as a ghost.  What follows this
process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade;
it is the resurrection of the body.  These people are quite prepared
to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man;
what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more
upon the hills of morning.  These people, and indeed most people,
were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old
Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day.
To many of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale
yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in daylight.
It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable,
that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven
like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale.
But other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then
the candle-light conquer the day.  Again and again, before our time,
men have grown content with a diluted doctrine.  And again and again
there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness
in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.  And we
only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers:
'Long years and centuries ago own fathers or the founders of our
people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God.  Long years
and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant
vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants.
Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation,
when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism.
Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out
and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world.
Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity
and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength
of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold.
Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened
our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those
vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last
savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain
of purple upon a sea of grey.  We have grown used to dilution,
to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever.
But 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'

This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all.
The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age.
It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death;
in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end.
It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most
universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to
the shock of the French Revolution.  But it has a more strange and
even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace.
It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often;
it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender.
We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the end
of Christ in its wedding of youth and death.  But this is almost as if
Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired
sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen
again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky.
It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent
weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world;
but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed.
It is a strangely immortal sort of widow.  An enemy may have said
at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars;
and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect
of the Pharaohs.  An enemy might say that it was the official
faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say
that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa.
All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end;
and there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them.
It ended and it began again.

'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'
The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world:  and men
no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight.
They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world.
The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have
not passed away.  In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was
so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord:
and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have
believed they could be torn asunder.  Feudalism itself was torn to rags
and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the
first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion.
Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away.
The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic
a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was
thought that the words would die.  They went forth across the radiant
abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light
and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints.
It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light
of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately
in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution.  Science explained it away;
and it was still there.  History disinterred it in the past; and it
appeared suddenly in the future.  To-day it stands once more in our path;
and even as we watch it, it grows.

If our social relations and records retain their continuity,
if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts
of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even
its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable
disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death.
They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature;
as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies.
'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'
They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err;
they will no longer watch for it to end.  Insensibly, even unconsciously,
they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil the relative
terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for
the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished;
and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet
or the freezing of the star.

* * *

CONCLUSION

THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK

I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing
the excellent phrase about an Outline of History; though this
study of a special truth and a special error can of course
claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided
encyclopedia of history.  for which that name was chosen.
And yet there is a certain reason in the reference:  and a sense
in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other.
For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here
only be criticised as an outline.  And, strangely enough,
it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline.
It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is splendid
as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating
disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification
of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history.
The one thing that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline;
the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that
which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile
of Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond.  In simple
and homely language, I mean the things that stick out;
the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette.
I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is
certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played
a great part as compared with what played a smaller part,
of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really
lies level with an average and what stands out as an exception.

I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer,
and I have no reason to do so; for in my own much smaller
task I feel I have failed in very much the same way.
I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader
the main point I meant about the proportions of history,
and why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others.
I doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set
out in the introductory chapter; and for that reason I add
these lines as a sort of summary in a concluding chapter.
I do believe that the things on which I have insisted are more
essential to an outline of history than the things which I
have subordinated or dismissed.  I do not believe that the past
is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely
fades away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away
into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology,
or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world.
In short I do not believe that the best way to produce an
outline of history is to rub out the lines.  I believe that,
of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale
very simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun
and stars or a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey.
I will therefore sum up all that has gone before in what seems
to me a realistic and reasonably proportioned statement;
the short story of mankind.

In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad
daylight, there are many and very various things motionless and moving.
There moves among them a race that is in its relation to others
a race of gods.  The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it
can behave like a race of demons.  Its distinction is not an
individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes;
it is a solid and a many-sided thing.  It is demonstrated
in the very speculations that have led to its being denied.
That men, the gods of this lower world, are linked with it in
various ways is true; but it is another aspect of the same truth.
That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the beasts walk
is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction.
It is like saying that a magician must after all have the appearance
of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without feet.
It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these mild
and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact altogether.
It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures.
Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see.  The fish does not
trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant
and the emu compare skeletons.  Even in the sense in which man
is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality.
The very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder
him from all.

Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as
the literal flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod
or demon of the visible world makes that world visible.
He sees around him a world of a certain style or type.
It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions.
He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands;
but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern,
like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger.
It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing.
It is not a growth or a groping of blind life.  Each seeks an end;
a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion
we see in looking across the level of a common field.
In the very shape of things there is more than green growth;
there is the finality of the flower.  It is a world of crowns.
This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so
profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters
of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved
to take a certain view of that world.  They have concluded,
rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree
seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower.
But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think,
it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought
with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible.
There was someone else, some strange and unseen being,
who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed.
There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious
benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods
and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise
against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire.
Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to the universe has
received more and more confirmation within the minds of men,
by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching
than any such argument about the external plan of the world.
But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple
and even concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men,
including the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world
has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause.
But most men in some sense separated themselves from
the wisest men, when it came to the treatment of that idea.
There came into existence two ways of treating that idea,
which between them made up most of the religious history of the world.
The majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second
meaning in things; of a strange master who knew the secret
of the world.  But the majority, the mob or mass of men,
naturally tended to treat it rather in the spirit of gossip.
The gossip, like all gossip, contained a great deal of truth
and falsehood.  The world began to tell itself tales about
the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers.
Some of the tales may truly be called old wives' tales; as professing
only to be very remote memories of the morning of the world;
myths about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains.
Some of them might more truly be called travellers' tales;
as being curious but contemporary tales brought from certain
borderlands of experience; such as miraculous cures or those
that bring whispers of what has happened to the dead.
Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are
probably true to keep a person of real commonsense more or less
conscious that there really is something rather marvellous
behind the cosmic curtain.  But in a sense it is only going
by appearances; even if the appearances are called apparitions.
It is a matter of appearances--and disappearances.
At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are glimpses.
For most of us they are rather gossip about glimpses.
And for the rest, the whole world is full of rumours,
most of which are almost avowedly romances.  The great majority
of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible king are told,
if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of the topic.
They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they are
not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be.
They are mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books--
or bound in any other way.

Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart
and had taken up an equally congenial trade.  They were drawing up
plans of the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan.
They were trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale.
They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had made
the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it might
be and what its ultimate purpose might be.  Some of them made
that mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it;
some simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few,
doubted it altogether.  One or two of the more morbid fancied
that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more
degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods.
But most of these theorists were theists:  and they not only saw a moral
plan in nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity.
Most of them were good men who did good work:  and they were
remembered and reverenced in various ways.  They were scribes;
any their scriptures became more or less holy scriptures.
They were law-givers; and their tradition became not only legal
but ceremonial.  We may say that they received divine honours,
in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries
often received divine honours.  In a word, wherever the other
popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip could come into play,
it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the myths.
Popular poetry turned the sages into saints.  But that was all it did.
They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were men,
only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes.
Divine Plato, like Divus Ceasar, was a title and not a dogma.
In Asia, where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man
was made to look more like a myth, but he remained a man.
He remained a man of a certain social class or school of men,
receiving and deserving great honour from mankind.
It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set
themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos
in the vision of life.  Instead of living on imaginative rumours
and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences
about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried
in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a priori.
They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of the world;
almost as if the world were not yet made.

Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception.
It is quite unlike anything else.  It is a thing final like the trump
of doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems
too good to be true.  It is nothing less than the loud assertion that
this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person.
It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle
of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible
being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists
hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World.  That such a higher
personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied
by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends.
But nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them.  It is
simply false to say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that
mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed.
Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort.
Not one of their sects or schools had even claimed that they had claimed
to be anything of the sort.  The most that any religious prophet had said
was that he was the true servant of such a being.  The most that any
visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory
of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings.
The most that any primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator
was present at the Creation.  But that the Creator was present at
scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked
with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life
of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted
by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years--
that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature.
It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke
his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog.  Its unique
character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it.
It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity;
but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.

It came on the world with a wind and rush of running
messengers proclaiming that apocalyptic portent, and it
is not unduly fanciful to say that they are running still.
What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful
pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church
is that they still behave as if they were messengers.
A messenger does not dream about what his message might be,
or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it
as it is.  It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact.
It is not relevant to this intentionally rudimentary outline
to prove in detail that it is a fact; but merely to point out
that these messengers do deal with it as men deal with a fact.
All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism
and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural
human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact.
I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial
complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines
of that strange story; which I have already called, in words
that are much too weak, the strangest story in the world.
I desire merely to mark those main lines and specially to mark
where the great line is really to be drawn.  The religion
of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided into fine
shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology.
It is divided by the line between the men who are bringing
that message and the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot
yet believe it.

But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more
concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered
by names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification.
For instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems,
we really mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean,
by that, that it contains so many men; men with the old average
assumption of men--that the invisible ruler remains invisible.
They hold it along with the customs of a certain culture and under
the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so they would if their
law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon.  They testify to something
which is a necessary and noble truth; but was never a new truth.
Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral and normal
tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man.
Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through
his own particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of
the ancient starlight.  So when we say that the country contains
so many Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans
whose prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of
the invisible power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal.
When we say that they also have temples and idols and priests
and periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen
is enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp
and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans
have more sense than Puritans.  But what the gods are supposed to be,
what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational
secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say.
Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has
any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.

Those runners gather impetus as they run.  Ages afterwards
they still speak as if something had just happened.
They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers;
they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses.
In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message,
there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of
something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world
like a suicide.  But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic;
it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds.
It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought;
and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs.
For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more
beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed.
We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as
the world grows old.

For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so
supernatural should have become so natural.  I mean that anything
so unique when seen from the outside should only seem universal
when seen from the inside.  I have not minimised the scale of
the miracle, as some of our wilder theologians think it wise to do.
Rather have I deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption,
as a blow that broke the very backbone of history.  I have great
sympathy with the monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom
it seems a blasphemy; a blasphemy that might shake the world.
But it did not shake the world; it steadied the world.  That fact,
the more we consider it, will seem more solid and more strange.
I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to insist
upon the audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them.
I willingly and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a suggestion
at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to reel,
when he realised his own belief.  But the brain of the believer
does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel.
We can see their brains reeling on every side and into every
extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and
the denial of life; into pragmatism and the denial of logic;
seeking their omens in nightmares and their canons in contradictions;
shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things beyond good and evil,
or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five.
Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in
outline remains solid and sane in substance.  It remains the moderator
of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists exactly as it
rescued laughter from the Puritans.  I repeat that I have deliberately
emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character.
The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained
defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural.
I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself,
a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass.
But the man who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows
for all the world.  He does not remain for after ages as a shining
and crystalline figure, in whose light everything is as clear as crystal

But this madness has remained sane.  The madness has remained sane
when everything else went mad.  The madhouse has been a house to which,
age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home.
That is the riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and
abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing.
I care not if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see
how so toppling a tower could stand so long without foundation.
Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become,
the home of man.  Had it merely appeared and disappeared,
it might possibly have been remembered or explained as
the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of
the ultimate mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke.
But the mind did not break.  It is the one mind that remains
unbroken in the break-up of the world.  If it were an error,
it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day.
If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy
could not endure for an hour.  It has endured for nearly
two thousand years; and the world within it has been
more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes,
more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful
in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside.
For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth from
the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense.
Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits;
and by His fruits we should know Him.  The fruits are solid
and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere
in this sad world are boys happier in apple-trees, or men
in more equal chorus singing as they tread the vine, than under
the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment;
the lightning made eternal as the light.

* * *

APPENDIX I

ON PREHISTORIC MAN

On re-reading these pages I feel that I have tried in many places
and with many words, to say something that might be said in one word.
In a sense this study is meant to be superficial.  That is.
it is not meant as a study of the things that need to be studied.
It is rather a reminder of the things that are seen
so quickly that they are forgotten almost as quickly.
Its moral, in a manner of speaking, is that first
thoughts are best; so a flash might reveal a landscape;
with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it
as they would never stand up again in the light of common day.
I ended the book with an image of everlasting lightning;
in a very different sense, alas, this little flash has lasted
only too long.  But the method has also certain practical
disadvantages upon which I think it well to add these two notes.
It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of ignorance.
I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric pictures;
which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn from
prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anyone
could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all.
I am conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence
may exaggerate even my own ignorance.  Without any pretence of
scientific research or information, I should be sorry to have it
thought that I knew no more than what was needed, in that passage,
of the states into which primitive humanity has been divided.
I am aware, of course, that the story is elaborately stratified;
and that there were many such stages before the Cro-Magnon
or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures.
Indeed recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races
rather tend to repeat the moral that is here most relevant.
The notion noted in these pages of something necessarily slow
or late in the development of religion, will gain little
indeed from these later revelations about the precursors
of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that,
whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not,
the people that lived before it were religious already;
burying their dead with the significant signs of mystery and hope.
This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument
that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man's skull.
It is little use here to compare the head of the man
with the head of the monkey, if it certainly never came
into the head of the monkey to bury another monkey with nuts
in his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey house.
Talking of skulls, I am also aware of the story of the Cro-Magnon
skull that was much larger and finer than a modern skull.
It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist,
awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against
anything being inferred from one specimen.  It is the duty of a
solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors.
Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior
is felt to be suffering from swelled head.


* * *

APPENDIX II

ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY

In this book which is merely meant as a popular criticism
of popular fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors,
I feel that I have sometimes given an impression of scoffing
at serious scientific work.  It was however the very reverse
of my intentions.  I am not arguing with the scientist who explains
the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away.
And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the gallery,
as he did in ancient Greece.  He appeals to the ignorant,
especially when he appeals to the learned.  But I never meant
my own criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned.
We all owe an infinite debt to the researches, especially the
recent researches, of single minded students in these matters;
and I have only professed to pick up things here and there from them.
I have not loaded my abstract argument with quotations
and references, which only make a man look more learned than he is;
but in some cases I find that my own loose fashion of allusion
is rather misleading about my own meaning.  The passage about
Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean
that the English poet probably had in mind the English saint;
of whose story he gives a sort of foreign version.  In the same
way two statements in the chapter on Mythology follow each other
in such a way that it may seem to be suggested that the second
story about monotheism refers to the Southern Seas.  I may explain
that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian but to American savages.
So in the chapter called "The Antiquity of Civilisation,"
which I feel to be the most unsatisfactory, I have given my
own impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian
monarchy too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the
facts on which it was formed as given in works like those of
Professor J. L Myres.  But the confusion was not intentional;
still less was there any intention to imply, in the remainder
of the chapter, that the anthropological speculations
about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are.
My criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the pyramids are
plainer than the tracks of the desert; without denying that wiser
men than I may see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.


