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{{TextQuality|75%}}{{title
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|title= The Thing
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|author= Gilbert Keith Chesterton
|title=The Thing
|notes= 1929.
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|author=Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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CONTENTS
1.  INTRODUCTION
2.  THE SCEPTIC AS CRITIC
3.  Is HUMANISM A RELIGION?
4.  THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY
5.  LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS
6.  OBSTINATE ORTHODOXY
7.  THE USUAL ARTICLE
8.  WHY I AM A CATHOLIC
9.  WHAT DO THEY THINK?
10.  THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC
11.  THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY
12.  PROTESTANTISM:  A PROBLEM NOVEL
13.  A SIMPLE THOUGHT
14.  THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS
15.  ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE
16.  THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS
17.  THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC
18.  WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS?
19.  THE HAT AND THE HALO
20.  ON TWO ALLEGORIES
21.  THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS
22.  ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE
23.  THE NORDIC HINDOO
24.  SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK
25.  THE ROOTS OF SANITY
26.  SOME OF OUR ERRORS
27.  THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND
28.  INGE VERSUS BARNES
29.  WHAT WE THINK ABOUT
30.  THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE
31.  THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL
32.  THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND
33.  IF THEY HAD BELIEVED
34.  PEACE AND THE PAPACY
35.  THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
-/-
== TOC ==


* [[The Thing/1|1. Introduction]]
* [[The Thing/1|1. Introduction]]
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* [[The Thing/35|35. The Spirit of Christmas]]
* [[The Thing/35|35. The Spirit of Christmas]]


 
[[Category:Gilbert Keith Chesterton]]
 
[[Category:1929]]
 
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== THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND ==
 
I HAVE chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe
many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave.  The nature of my supposed
slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss.
It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw.
That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable;
which is entirely reasonable.  Indeed it would be rather
difficult to travel in every train to find out where it went.
It would be still more difficult to go to the destination
in order to discover whether it was safe to begin the journey.
Suppose a wild scare arose that Bradshaw was a conspiracy to produce
railway accidents, a man might still believe the Guide to be a Guide
and the scare to be only a scare; but he would know of the existence
of the scare.  What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state
in which men do not know of the alternative.  It is something
which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep,
so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all.
It is not the state in which he says, "I see what you mean; but I cannot
think that because I sincerely think this" (which is simply rational):
it is one in which he has never thought of the other view;
and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it.
Though I am not discussing here my own religion, I think it
only right to say that its authorities have never had this sort
of narrowness.  You may condemn their condemnations as oppressive;
but not in this sense as obscurantist.  St. Thomas Aquinas begins
his enquiry by saying in effect, "Is there a God?  It would
seem not, for the following reasons"; and the most criticised
of recent Encyclicals always stated a view before condemning it.
The thing I mean is a man's inability to state his opponent's view;
and often his inability even to state his own.
 
Curiously enough, I find this sort of thing rather specially widespread
in our age, which claims to possess a popular culture or enlightenment.
There is everywhere the habit of assuming certain things,
in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things.
For instance, as history is taught, nearly everybody assumes that
in all important past conflicts, it was the right side that won.
Everybody assumes it; and nobody knows that he assumes it.
The man has simply never seriously entertained the other notion.
Say to him that we should now all of us be better off if Charles Edward
and the Jacobites had captured London instead of falling back from Derby,
and he will laugh.  He will think it is what he calls a "paradox."
Yet nothing can be a more sober or solid fact than that, when the issue
was undecided, wise and thoughtful men were to be found on both sides;
and the Jacobite theory is not in any way disproved by the fact
that Cumberland could outflank the clans at Drummossie.
I am not discussing whether it was right as a theory; I am only
noting that it is never allowed to occur to anybody as a thought.
The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination.
If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had
never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have
to adjust their minds with a jerk.  The very notion is new to them.
Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality
and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion;
unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and
the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges.  But in this age of free-thinkers,
men's minds are not really free to think such a thought.
 
What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate
in this way accept it without knowing why.  By a quaint paradox,
those who thus assume that history always took the right turning
are generally the very people who do not believe there was any
special providence to guide it.  The very rationalists who jeer
at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept
a trial by combat as deciding all human history.  In the war of
the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote
on their flags the rhyme, "Conquer we must for our cause is just."
The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that
their opponents copied and continued it in the form "Conquer they didn't;
so their cause wasn't." But the latter logic is as bad as the former.
I have just read a book called, "The American Heresy,"
by Mr. Christopher Hollis.  It is a very brilliant and original book;
but I know it will not be taken sufficiently seriously;
because the reader will have to wrench his mind out of a rut even
to imagine the South victorious; still more to imagine anybody
saying that a small, limited and agricultural America would have
been better for everybody--especially Americans.
 
I could give many other examples of what I mean by this
imaginative bondage.  It is to be found in the strange superstition
of making sacred figures out of certain historical characters;
who must not be moved from their stiff symbolic attitudes.
Even their bad qualities are sacred.  Much new light has lately
been thrown on Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart.  It is not only
favourable to Mary but on the whole favourable to Elizabeth.
It seems pretty certain that Mary did not plot to kill Darnley.
It seems highly probable that Elizabeth did not plot to kill Mary.
But many people are quite as tenderly attached to the idea
of a merciless Elizabeth as to that of a murderous Mary.
That a man devoted to Protestantism should rejoice that Elizabeth
succeeded, that a man devoted to Catholicism should wish that Mary
had succeeded--all that would be perfectly natural and rational.
But Elizabeth was not Protestantism; and it ought not to
disturb anybody to discover that she was hardly a Protestant.
It ought to be even less gratification to her supporters to insist
that she was a tyrant.  But there is a sort of waxwork history,
that cannot be happy unless Elizabeth has an axe and Mary a dagger.
This sense of fixed and sacred figures ought to belong to
a religion; but a historical speculation is not a religion.
To believe in Calvinism by faith alone is comprehensible.
To believe in Cromwell by faith alone is incomprehensible.
It is supremely incomprehensible that when Calvinists left off
believing in Calvinism, they still insisted on believing in Cromwell.
To a simple rationalist like myself, these prejudices are
hard to understand.
 
-/-
 
== INGE VERSUS BARNES ==
 
NONE of us I hope ever wished to be unjust to Dean Inge:
though in such fights the button will sometimes come off the foil.
And a cruel injustice is being done to him, in the suggestion
widely circulated that he agrees with Dr. Barnes.  Such things
should not be lightly said of any gentleman.  It is in accordance
with the current legend, at least, that the Gloomy Dean even when
he comes to bless should remain to curse.  But if there is one
isolated human being whom he can be imagined as wanting to bless,
one would think it would be his ally, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham.
And yet the alliance only serves to soften the curse and not
to secure the blessing.  If we may use such popular terms of such
dignified ecclesiastics, we might be tempted to say that the Dean
has found it necessary to throw over the Bishop.  An interesting
review by the Dean of the Bishop's recent book of sermons contains,
of course, a certain number of rather conventional compliments
and a certain number of rather abrupt sneers, we might say snarls,
at various other people including the greater part of Christendom.
But on the two striking and outstanding matters on which Bishop Barnes
was condemned by the Catholics, he is almost as strongly condemned by
the Dean of St. Paul's. Dean Inge is far too intelligent and cultivated
a man to pretend to have much patience with the nonsense about testing
Transubstantiation either by chemical experiments or psychical research.
He tries to break it to his Broad Church colleague as gently
as possible that the latter has made himself a laughing stock.
But allowing for such necessary politeness between partners,
it could hardly be stated better or even more plainly.
He curtly refers the Bishop to the responsible definition of
the doctrine in Father Rickaby's book on metaphysics; and drily
observes that it will be found rather more subtle and plausible than
the Bishop seems to be aware of.  He also adds, with a grim candour
which is rather attractive, that it is pretty disastrous to challenge
Catholics about whether the Mass does them any spiritual good,
since they would quite certainly unite in testifying that it does.
After these frank and arresting admissions, it is a mere matter
of routine, and almost of respectability, that the Dean should agree
with the Bishop that all such sacramentalism is very deplorable;
that the admittedly intelligent people he knows who say they
have found Christ in the Mass and not in the Morning Service
must be "natural idolaters" and that it is "obvious" that the
Blessed Sacrament has an affinity with the lower religions.
Also with the lower classes.  That, I fancy, is what the Dean really
finds so disgusting about it.
 
The point is, however, that the Dean definitely snubs the Bishop on
the one great point on which the newspapers have boomed and boosted him.
And he does exactly the same thing, if in a lesser degree,
on the second and lesser matter which was similarly boosted.
I mean, of course, the matter of Evolution.  The Dean, of course,
believes in Evolution, as do a good many other people,
Catholic and Protestant as well as agnostic.  But though he believes
in Evolution, he does not believe in Bishop Barnes's Evolution.
He comments with admirable clarity and decision on the folly
of identifying progress with evolution; or even mere complication
with progress.  Nothing could be better than the brief and brisk
sentences in which he disposes altogether of that idealisation
of the scientific theory, which is in fact simply ignorance of it.
In plain words, Bishop Barnes, for all his bluster, knows almost
as little about Evolution as he does about Transubstantiation.
The Dean of St. Paul's does not, of course, put this truth
in such plain words; but he manages to make it pretty plain.
His candour in this case also has to be balanced by general expressions
of agreement with the Bishop, and somewhat heartier expressions of
disagreement with everybody else, especially with the Bishop's enemies.
The Dean alludes scornfully to the orthodox world, as if it necessarily
repudiated certain biological theories; or as if it mattered
very much if it did.  The difference between the Broad Churchman
and the Catholic Church is not that the former thinks Evolution true
and the latter thinks it false.  It is that the former thinks Evolution
an explanation and the latter knows it is not an explanation.
Hence the former thinks it all important; and the latter thinks
it rather unimportant.  Being unable to grasp this principle,
the Dean has to fall back on quoting an old Victorian cant phrase;
and saying that a new scientific discovery passes through three stages:
that of being called absurd; of being called anti-scriptural;
and of being discovered to be quite old and familiar.
He might have added that it generally goes on to a fourth stage;
that of being discovered to be quite untrue.
 
For that is the very simple fact which both Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes
leave out; and which seems to be as utterly unknown to the more lucid
rationalism of the one as to the cruder secularism of the other.
Not only was the Archbishop of Canterbury right in suggesting that old
gentlemen like himself had been familiar with Evolution all their lives;
but he might have added that they were much more certain of it
in the earlier part of their lives than they will be by the end
of their lives.  Those of them who have really read the most recent
European enquiries and speculations know that Darwinism is every
day becoming much less of a dogma and much more of a doubt.
Those who have not read the speculations and the doubts simply go
on repeating the dogma.  While Dr. Barnes was preaching sermons
carefully founded on the biology of fifty years ago, Mr. Belloc was
proving conclusively before the whole world that Mr. H. G. Wells and
Sir Arthur Keith were unacquainted with the biology of five years ago.
In short, it is only just, as we have said, to insist on the difference
between Dean Inge and Dr. Barnes; which is like the difference
between Huxley and Haeckel.  Everybody would be better and happier
if Dean Inge were known as Professor Inge; and if Dr. Barnes were not
only a Professor but a Prussian Professor.  Then he could be boomed
along with other barbarians attacking Christianity, without having
the ecclesiastical privilege of actually persecuting Christians.
But there are heathens and heathens and there are persecutors
and persecutors.  The Dean is a pagan Roman of the Senate House.
The Bishop is a pagan Teuton of the swamps and fens.  The Dean dislikes
the Christian tradition in the spirit of Diocletian and Julian.
The Bishop dislikes it in the simpler spirit of a Danish pirate
staring at the rigid mystery of a Roman-British Church.
Even the common cause and broad brotherly maxim of CHRISTIANI AD LEONES
did not always, I fancy, reconcile the Roman and the Goth.
These historical comparisons may seem fanciful; and indeed in one sense
both parties are very much tied to their own historical period.
They are both very Victorian; but even here there is a difference
and a superiority.  The superiority of the Dean is that he knows
it and says so.  He is man enough to boast of being Victorian
and not to mind being called reactionary.  Whereas the Bishop seems
really to cherish the truly extraordinary notion that his notions
are new and up-to-date.
 
Of course they have a philosophy in common; and it would be a cheap
simplification to call it Materialism.  Indeed, we should be almost
as shallow in talking about Materialism as they are in talking
about Magic.  The truth is that the strange bigotry, which leads
the Bishop to scream and rail at all sacramentalism as Magic,
is in its inmost essence the very reverse of Materialism.
Indeed it is nothing half so healthy as Materialism.
The root of this prejudice is not so much a trust in matter as a sort
of horror of matter.  The man of this philosophy is always asking
that worship shall be wholly spiritual, or even wholly intellectual;
because he does really feel a disgust at the idea of spiritual things
having a body and a solid form.  It probably does really give him
a mystical shudder to suppose that God can become as bread and wine;
though I never understood why it should not give the same shudder
to say that God could become flesh and blood.  But whether or no
these thinkers are logical in their philosophy, I think this is
their philosophy.  It has a very long history and an ancient name.
It is not Materialist but Manichee.
 
Indeed the Dean uttered an unconscious truth when he said
the sacramentalists must be "natural idolaters."  He shrinks from it
not only because it is idolatrous, but also because it is natural.
He cannot bear to think how natural is the craving for the supernatural.
He cannot tolerate the idea of it actually working through the
elements of nature.  Unconsciously, no doubt, but very stubbornly,
that sort of intellectual does feel that our souls may belong
to God, but our bodies only to the devil or the beast.
That Manichean horror of matter is the only INTELLIGENT reason for
any such sweeping refusal of supernatural and sacramental wonders.
The rest is all cant and repetition and arguing in a circle;
all the baseless dogmatism about science forbidding men to
believe in miracles; as if SCIENCE could forbid men to believe
in something which science does not profess to investigate.
Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove
a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended
by something admittedly above them.  It is as if we were to say
that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution
that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.
Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text
of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped
the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire.  The constitution
follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it;
the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played;
the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there
is nothing behind it to stop it.  But that fact throws no sort
of light on whether there IS anything behind it to stop it.  That is
a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science.
And out of respect for the intelligence of both these reverend gentlemen,
and especially for the high intelligence of the Dean of St. Paul's, I much
prefer to think that they are opposed to what they call Magic
as consistent philosophers and not as inconsistent scientists.
I prefer to think that they are thinking along the lines of great
Gnostics and Buddhists and other mystics of a dark but dignified
historical tradition; rather than that they are blundering
in plain logic in the interests of cheap popular science.
I can even understand or imagine that thrill of repulsion that seizes
them in the presence of the divine materialism of the Mass.
But I still think they would be more consistent and complete, if they
made it quite clear that they carried their principle to completion;
and said, as the Moslem says about Christmas, "Far be it from Him
to have a Son," or the terrified disciples who cried, "Far be this
from Thee," when God was going up to be crucified.
 
-/-
 
== WHAT WE THINK ABOUT ==
 
I WAS looking the other day at a weekly paper of the sort that is
supposed to provide popular culture; in this case rather especially
what may be called popular science.  In practice it largely
provides what its supporters optimistically call Modern Thought
and what we more commonly call Modernism.  It is, however, a paper
by no means unfair or exclusive of the opposite point of view;
it has more than once permitted me to reply to these views;
and in looking at the issue in question, my eye was arrested
by my own name.
 
It occurred in an article on the religious doctrines of
Mr. Arnold Bennett.  Indeed the prominence in the press of this name
in this connection is one of the standing mysteries of modern journalism.
I have not only a great admiration for the artistic genius,
but in many ways a strong liking for the human personality of
Mr. Arnold Bennett.  I like his liveliness and contempt for contempt.
I like his humanity and merciful curiosity about every thing human.
I like that essential absence of snobbishness that enables him
to sympathise even with snobs.  But talking about the religious
beliefs of Mr. Arnold Bennett seems to me exactly like talking
about the foxhunting adventures of Mr. Bernard Shaw or the favourite
vintages of Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson or the celestial visions of
Sir Arthur Keith or the monastic vows of Mr. Bertrand Russell.
Mr. Arnold Bennett has never disguised, as it seems to me,
the essential fact that he has not got any religious beliefs;
as religious beliefs were understood in the English language
as I learnt it.  That he has a number of highly estimable
moral sentiments and sympathies I do not for a moment doubt.
But the matter of Mr. Arnold Bennett is, for the moment, a parenthesis.
I mention it here merely because it was in the course of such
an article that I found myself mentioned; and I confess I thought
the reference a little odd.  It will not surprise the reader to learn
that the writer found me less Modernist than Mr. Arnold Bennett.
My religious beliefs did not present so pure and virgin and blameless
a blank, but were defaced with definite statements about various things.
But the writer professed to find something dubious or mysterious
about my attitude; and what mystifies me is his mystification.
He delicately implied that there was more in me than met the eye;
that I had that within, which passed all these Papistical shows,
but that it was hopeless to vivisect me and discover the secret.
He said:  "Mr. Chesterton does not mean to enlighten us; for all we
know he is Modernist enough in his own thoughts."
 
Now it would be thought a little annoying if an atheist were to say
of some harmless Protestant Christian like General Booth; "For all
we know, he is atheist enough in his own thoughts."  We might even
venture to enquire how the atheist could possibly form any notion
of what General Booth thought, in such complete contradiction
to everything he said.  Or I myself, on the other hand, might seem
less than graceful, if I were to suggest that Mr. Arnold Bennett must
be concealing his conversion out of cowardice; and were to express
it in the form: "Mr. Bennett will never tell us the truth about it;
for all we know he is Papist enough in his own thoughts."
I might even be cross-examined about how I had come to form
these suspicions about the secret thoughts of Mr. Arnold Bennett;
as to whether I had hidden under his bed and heard him muttering
Latin prayers in his dreams, or sent a private detective to verify
the existence of his hair-shirt and his concealed relics.
It might be hinted that, until I could produce some such PRIMA FACIE
case for my suspicions, it would be more polite to suppose that
the opinions of Mr. Bennett were what he himself said they were.
And if I were sensitive on such things, I might make a rather
sharp request, that people who cannot possibly know anything about me
except what I say, should for the sake of our general convenience
believe what I say.  On the subject of Modernism, at any rate,
there has never been the least doubt or difficulty about what I say.
For, as it happens, I had a strong intellectual contempt for Modernism,
even before I really believed in Catholicism.
 
But I belong, as a biological product of evolution, to the order
of the pachyderms.  And I am not in the least moved by any annoyance
in the matter; but only by a very strong mystification and curiosity
about the real reason for this remarkable point of view.
I know that the writer did not mean any harm; but I am much
more interested in trying to understand what he did mean.
And the truth is, I think, that there is hidden in this curious
and cryptic phrase the secret of the whole modern controversy
about Catholicism.  What the man really meant was this:
"Even poor old Chesterton must think; he can't have actually left
off thinking altogether; there must be some form of cerebral
function going forward to fill the empty hours of his misdirected
and wasted life; and it is obvious that if a man begins to THINK,
he can only think more or less in the direction of Modernism."
The Modernists do really think that.  That is the point.
That is the joke.
 
Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all
these people, somehow, is that a thinking man can think himself
deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper
into difficulties about Catholicism.  We have got to make them
see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful,
progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect.  For THAT is
the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe.
They honestly say to themselves:  "What can he be thinking about,
if he is not thinking about the Mistakes of Moses, as discovered
by Mr. Miggles of Pudsey, or boldly defying all the terrors of the
Inquisition which existed two hundred years ago in Spain?"  We have got
to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity
or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-points for trains
of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual,
compared with which all that sceptical scratching is as thin,
shallow and dusty as a nasty piece of scandalmongering in a
New England village.  Thus, to accept the Logos as a truth is
to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John
the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world.
To accept the Logos as a "text" or an "interpolation"
or a "development" or a dead word in a dead document, only used
to give in rapid succession about six different dates to
that document, is to be altogether on a lower plane of human life;
to be squabbling and scratching for a merely negative success;
even if it really were a success.  To exalt the Mass is to enter
into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all
the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most
impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections.
To set out to belittle and minimise the Mass, by talking ephemeral
back-chat about what it had in common with Mithras or the Mysteries,
is to be in altogether a more petty and pedantic mood; not only lower
than Catholicism but lower even than Mithraism.
 
As I have said before, it is very difficult to say how we can best
set about these things.  We and our critics have come to talk
in two different languages; so that the very names by which we
describe the things inside stand for totally different things
in the absurd labels they have stuck upon the wall outside.
Often if we said the great things we have to say, they would
sound like the small things they accuse us of saying.
A philosophical process can only begin at the right end;
and they have got hold of everything by the wrong end.
But I am myself disposed to think that we should begin by challenging
one very common phrase or form of words; a thing that has become a
catch-word and a caption; or in the ordinary popular phrase a headline.
Because the journalists incessantly repeat it, and draw attention
to it by repeating it, we may possibly draw attention by denying it.
 
When the journalist says for the thousandth time, "Living religion
is not in dull and dusty dogmas, etc."  we must stop him with a
sort of shout and say, "There--you go wrong at the very start."
If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out
that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring,
that are intellectually interesting.  Zeal and charity and unction
are admirable as flowers and fruit; but if you are really interested
in the living principle you must be interested in the root or the seed.
In other words, you must be intelligently interested in the statement
with which the whole thing started; even if it is only to deny it.
Even if the critic cannot come to agree with the Catholic, he can come to
see that it is certain ideas about the Cosmos that make him a Catholic.
He can see that being Cosmic in that way, and Catholic in that way,
is what makes him different from other people; and what makes him,
at the very least, a not uninteresting figure in human history.
He will never get anywhere near it by sentimentalising against
Catholic sentiment or pontificating against Catholic pontiffs.
He must get hold of the ideas as ideas; and he will find that
the most interesting of all the ideas are those which the newspapers
dismiss as dogmas.
 
For instance; the doctrine of the Dual Nature of Christ is in
the most genuine sense interesting; it ought to be interesting
to anybody who can understand it, long before he can believe it.
It has what can be called with all reverence a stereoscopic interest;
the interest of having the two eyes in the head that create an object;
of having the two angles in the triangle that determine the third.
The old Monophysite sect declared that Christ had only the one
divine nature.  The new Monophysite sect declares that He had
only the one human nature.  But it is not a pun or a trick,
but a truth, to say that the Monophysite is by nature monotonous.
In either of his two forms, he is naturally on one note.
The question of objective historical truth is another question,
which I am not arguing here, though I am ready to argue it anywhere.
I am talking about intellectual stimulation and the starting point
of thought and imagination.  And these, like all living things,
breed from the conjunction of two, and not from one alone.
Thus I read, with sympathy but a sympathy that hardly goes
beyond sentiment, the studies of the modern Monophysites in
the life of the limited and merely mortal Jesus of Nazareth.
I respect their respect; I admire their admiration; I know that all
they say about human greatness or religious genius is true as far
as it goes.  But it goes along one line; and cannot convince
like the things that can converge.  And then, after reading such
a tribute to an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes,
perhaps I turn another page of the same or some similar book;
and come upon some phrase used about a real though a pagan religion;
perhaps some supposed parallel of what is called a Pagan Christ.
I find it said, if only of Atys or Adonis, "There was a conception
that the god sacrificed himself to himself."  The man who can read
those words without a thrill is dead.
 
The thrill is deeper for us, of course, because it is concerned
with a fact and not a fancy.  In that sense we do not admit
that there is any such parallel with the legends of the ancient
pagans as is implied in the books of the modern pagans.
And indeed we are surely entitled to call it mere common sense
to say that there can be no complete parallel between what was
admittedly a myth or mystery and what was admittedly a man.
But the point here is that the truth hidden even in myths and mysteries
is altogether lost if we are confined to the consideration of a man.
In this sense there is an ironic and unconscious truth in the words
of the modern pagan, who sang that "the heathen outface and
outlive us," and that "our lives and our longings are twain."
It is true of the Modernists, but it is not true of us, who find
simultaneously the realisation of a longing and the record of a life.
It is perfectly true that there were in many pagan myths
the faint foreshadowing of the Christian mysteries; though even
in saying so we admit that the foreshadowings were shadows.
But when all imaginative kinship has been explored or allowed for,
it is not true that mythology ever rose to the heights of theology.
It is not true that a thought so bold or so subtle as this one
ever crossed the mind that created the centaurs and the fauns.
In the wildest and most gigantic of the primitive epic fancies,
there is no conception so colossal as the being who is both
Zeus and Prometheus.
 
But I only advert to it here, not as arguing its truth against
those who do not believe it, but only as insisting on its
intense and intellectual interest for those who do believe it.
I only wish to explain to those who are worried in this way,
that a mind filled with the true conception of this Duality has plenty
to think about along those lines and has no need to dig up dead gods
to discredit the Everlasting Man.  There is no necessity for me
to be Modernist in my own thoughts, or Monophysite in my own thoughts;
because I think these views much duller and more trivial than my own.
In the beautiful words of the love-song in THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG,
one of the few truly psychological love-songs of the world:
"This insignificant and universally despised person would unhesitatingly
prefer his thoughts to theirs."
 
Any number of other examples could of course be given.
This person (if I may use once more the graceful Chinese locution)
would very soon exhaust the excitement of discovering that Mary
and Maia both begin with an M, or that the Mother of Christ
and the Mother of Cupid were both represented as women.
But I know that I shall never exhaust the profundity of that
unfathomable paradox which is defined so defiantly in the very title
of the Mother of God.  I know that there are not only far deeper,
but far fresher and freer developments of thought and imagination,
in that riddle of the perfectly human having once had a natural
authority over the supernaturally divine, than in any sort of
iconoclastic identification which assimilates all the sacred images
by flattening all their faces.  By the time that Christ is really made
the same as Osiris, there can be very little left of either of them;
but Christ, as conceived by the Catholic Church, is himself a complex
and a combination, not of two unreal things, but of two real ones.
In the same way an Ashtaroth exactly like one of Raphael's Madonnas,
or vice versa, would seem a somewhat featureless vision in any case;
whereas there is something that is, in the most intellectual sense,
unique about the conception of the THEOTOKOS.  In short, in all this
mere unification of traditions, true or false, there is something that
may be quite simply described as dull.  But the dogmas are not dull.
Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull.
They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve
from nerve, but giving life.  It is easy enough to flatten out everything
for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death.
But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues,
so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws
a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.
It is the custom, though by this time; already a rather stale custom,
to complain that the Greeks or Italians who disputed about the Trinity
or the Sacrament were splitting hairs.  I do not know that even splitting
hairs is any drearier than bleaching hairs, in the vain attempt
to match the golden hair of Freya and the black hair of Cotytto.
The subdivision of a hair does at least tell us something of
its structure; whereas its mere discoloration tells us nothing at all.
Theology does introduce us to the structure of ideas; whereas theosophical
syncretism merely washes all the colours out of the coloured
fairy-tales of the world.  But my only purpose in this place is to
reassure the kind gentleman who was troubled about the secret malady
of modernity that must be eating away my otherwise empty mind.
I hasten earnestly to explain that I am quite well, thank you;
and that I have plenty of things to think about without falling
back on a Baconian madness of pagan parallels, or establishing
the connection between the tale of the bull killed by Mithras
and the tune the old cow died of.
 
-/-
 
== THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE ==
 
FREETHINKERS are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.
In the modern world of the West, at any rate, they seem always
to be tied to the treadmill of a materialist and monist cosmos.
The universal sceptic, in Asia or in Antiquity, has probably
been a bolder thinker, though very probably a more unhappy man.
But what we have to deal with as scepticism is not scepticism; but a fixed
faith in monism.  The freethinker is not free to question monism.
He is forbidden, for instance, in the only intelligible modern sense,
to believe in a miracle.  He is forbidden, in exactly the same sense
in which he would say that we are forbidden to believe in a heresy.
Both are forbidden by first principles and not by force.
The Rationalist Press Association will not actually kidnap,
gag or strangle Sir Arthur Keith if he admits the evidence
for a cure at Lourdes.  Neither will the Cardinal Archbishop
of Westminster have me hanged, drawn and quartered if I announce
that I am an agnostic tomorrow.  But of both cases it is true to say
that a man cannot root up his first principles without a terrible
rending and revolutionising of his very self.  As a matter of fact,
we are the freer of the two; as there is scarcely any evidence,
natural or preternatural, that cannot be accepted as fitting into
our system somewhere; whereas the materialist cannot fit the most
minute miracle into his system anywhere.  But let us leave that on
one side as a separate question; and agree, if only for the sake
of argument, that both the Catholic and the materialist are limited
only by their fundamental conviction about the cosmic system;
in both thought is in that sense forbidden and in that sense free.
Consequently, when I see in some newspaper symposium, like that
on Spiritualism, a leading materialist like Mr. John M. Robertson
discussing the evidence for spiritualism, I feel exactly as I
imagine him to feel when he hears a bishop in a mitre or a Jesuit
in a cassock discussing the evidence for materialism.  I know that
Mr. Robertson cannot accept the evidence without becoming somebody
quite different from Mr. Robertson; which also is within the power
of the grace of God.  But I know quite well he is not a freethinker;
except in the sense in which I am a freethinker.  He has long ago
come to a conclusion which controls all his other conclusions.
He is not driven by scientific evidence to accept Materialism.
He is forbidden by Materialism to accept scientific evidence.
 
But there is another way in which the freethinker is not
only thoughtful, but useful.  The man who rejects the Faith
altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who
rejects it piecemeal, or bit by bit, or by fits and starts.
The man who picks out some part of Catholicism that happens to
please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him,
does in fact produce, not only the queerest sort of result,
but generally the very opposite result to what he intends.
And his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from
the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view.
It has been said that when the half-gods go, the gods arrive;
it might be said in amiable parody that when the no-goddites arrive,
the half-goddites go; and I am not sure it is not a good riddance.
Anyhow, even the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep
the Catholic system altogether, even if he rejects it altogether.
 
A curious and amusing instance comes from America; in connection
with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that
land of simplicity.  He seems to have been writing something about
the impossibility of anybody having a soul; of which nothing need
be said except that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really
thinks of the soul superstitiously, as a separate and secret animal
with wings; who considers the soul quite apart from the self.
But what interests me about him at the moment is this.  One of his
arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it.
And one of his arguments for that is that if they did believe in
certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves.
He says that nobody would endure the martyrdom of cancer, for instance,
if he really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe)
that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce
the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends.
A Catholic will certainly know what answer he has to give.
But Mr. Clarence Darrow does not really in the least know what question
he has asked.
 
Now there we have the final flower and crown of all modern
optimism and universalism and humanitarianism in religion.
Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most
glorious of all human words; they assume that there can be nothing
in the next world except the sort of Utopia of practical pleasure
which they promise us (but do not give us) in this world.  They declare
that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive.
They insist that "passing over" is only like going into the next room,
they insist that it will not even be a waiting-room. They declare
that it must immediately introduce us to a cushioned lounge with all
conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there.
They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death.
All is hope, happiness and optimism.  And, as the atheist very truly
points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and
optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts
or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals.
We should find the rational result of the modern Religion of Joy
and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide.  Pessimism would
have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands.
 
Now, of course, as I say, a Catholic knows the answer;
because he holds the complete philosophy, which keeps a man sane;
and not some single fragment of it, whether sad or glad, which may
easily drive him mad.  A Catholic does not kill himself because he does
not take it for granted that he will deserve heaven in any case,
or that it will not matter at all whether he deserves it at all.
He does not profess to know exactly what danger he would run;
but he does know what loyalty he would violate and what command
or condition he would disregard.  He actually thinks that a man might
be fitter for heaven because he endured like a man; and that a hero
could be a martyr to cancer as St. Lawrence or St. Cecilia were martyrs
to cauldrons or gridirons.  The faith in a future life, the hope
of a future happiness, the belief that God is Love and that loyalty
is eternal life, these things do not produce lunacy and anarchy,
IF they are taken along with the other Catholic doctrines about
duty and vigilance and watchfulness against the powers of hell.
They might produce lunacy and anarchy, if they were taken alone.
And the Modernists, that is, the optimists and the sentimentalists,
did want us to take them alone.  Of course, the same would be true,
if somebody took the other doctrines of duty and discipline alone.
It would produce another dark age of Puritans rapidly blackening
into Pessimists.  Indeed, the extremes meet, when they are both ends
clipped off what should be a complete thing.  Our parable ends
poetically with two gibbets side by side; one for the suicidal
pessimist and the other for the suicidal optimist.
 
The point is that in this passage the American sceptic is
answering the Modernist; but he is not answering the Catholic.
The Catholic has an extremely simple and sensible reason for not
cutting his throat in order to fly instantly into Paradise.
But he might really raise a question for those who talk as if
Paradise were invariably and instantly populated with people
who had cut their throats.  And this is only one example out
of a long list of historical examples; in which those who tried
to make the Faith more simple invariably made it less sane.
The Moslems imagined that they were merely being sensible when they
cut down the creed to a mere belief in one God; but in the world
of practical psychology they really cut it down to one Fate.
The actual effect on ordinary men was simply fatalism; like that of
the Turk who will not take his wound to a hospital because he is
resigned to Kismet or the will of Allah.  The Puritans thought they
were simplifying things by appealing to what they called the plain
words of Scripture; but as a fact they were complicating things
by bringing in half a hundred cranky sects and crazy suggestions.
And the modern universalist and humanitarian thought they were simplifying
things when they interpreted the great truth that God is Love, as meaning
that there can be no war with the demons or no danger to the soul.
But in fact they were inventing even darker riddles with even
wilder answers; and Mr. Clarence Darrow has suggested one of them.
He will be gratified to receive the thanks of all Catholics
for doing so.
 
-/-
 
== THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL ==
 
I HAVE remarked on the curious rearguard action of bluff
that is being fought to cover the retreat of the Darwinians.
An example of the same thing has appeared in connection with a much
more famous name; indeed, with two famous names.  Mr. H. G. Wells
has replied to Mr. Belloc, who wrote a criticism of the "Outline
of History," chiefly to protest against a certain tone of arbitrary
generalisation and sham knowledge of the unknown.  A typical case was
that in which Mr. Wells said of the men who drew reindeers in caves:
"There seems no scope in such a life for speculation or philosophy,"
and Mr. Belloc not unnaturally answered:  "Why on earth not?"
But the details of the various works in question do not concern
me immediately here; they mostly depend on that habit of talking
as if every cave-drawing had its date obligingly inscribed on it;
or any stone hatchet might bear the inscription 400,000 B.C.
or possibly, B.O.H., or Before the Outline of History.  At the moment
the only point of contact is that which affects a continuation
of our previous criticism, touching the present state of Darwinism.
And what strikes me is that even Mr. Wells, often a sufficiently
warm controversialist, is relatively and really cold in the matter;
and his defence of Darwin is much more of an apology than an apologia.
Indeed, like so many other modern apologies, it almost amounts
to pleading that Darwin was not a Darwinian.
 
The Victorian evolutionists devoted themselves to declaring how great
Darwin's thesis was.  The new evolutionists seem to devote themselves
to explaining how small it was.  They really seem to plead, as in the
old anecdote, that it gave birth to a theory, but a very little one.
Some of Mr. Wells's words may surely, without unfairness,
be called apologetic.  He does not, like the professor previously
mentioned, try to get over the word "origin" by talking about "the
cause of the origin."  So he concentrates on the word "species,"
as if evolution had not only applied to a sub-division. He adds
that Darwin did not at the beginning even apply it to man.
What in the world would the Victorian Darwinians have said had they
heard it urged in defence of Darwinism that it was not applied to man?
Are we to understand that only the first book of Darwin is
divinely inspired?  Again, Mr. Wells says that natural selection
is common sense.  And doubtless, if it only means that things fitted
for survival do survive, it is common sense.  We may also add
that it is common knowledge.  Has it come to this, that Darwin
is defended because he only discovered what was common knowledge?
The real question, of course, is that stated by Mr. Belloc;
when he said that nobody needs to be told that in a flood fish live
and cattle die.  The question is, How soon do cattle turn into fish?
That would be an example of the true Darwinian theory;
and it is now merely minimised, represented as only one element
of evolution and without even the elements of an explanation.
We fancy there is a healthy prejudice behind it all.
Mr. Wells indignantly repudiates the slander uttered by Mr. Belloc,
who called him a patriot.  But it is true; the deep English national
pride has much to do with this devotion.  And rather than deprive
England of her Darwin, they have deprived Darwin of his discovery.
 
When a man is as great a genius as Mr. Wells, I admit it
sounds provocative to call him provincial.  But if he wants
to know why anybody does it, it will be enough to point
silently to the headline of one of his pages, which runs:
"Where is the Garden of Eden?"  To come down to a thing like that,
and to think it telling, when talking to an intelligent Catholic about
the Fall, that IS provinciality; proud and priceless provinciality.
The French peasants of whom Mr. Wells speaks are not in that
sense provincial.  As Mr. Wells says, they do not know anything
about Darwin and Evolution.  They do not know and they do not care.
That is where they are much better philosophers than Mr. Wells.
They hold the philosophy of the Fall, in the form of a simple story
which may be historic or symbolic, but anyhow cannot be more important
than what it symbolises.  In comparison with that truth, it does
not matter twopence whether any evolutionary theory is true or not.
Whether or no the garden was an allegory, the truth itself can be
very well allegorised as a garden.  And the point of it is that Man,
whatever else he is, is certainly NOT merely one of the plants
of the garden that has plucked its roots out of the soil and walked
about with them like legs, or on the principle of a double
dahlia has grown duplicate eyes and ears.  He is something else,
something strange and solitary; and more like the statue that was once
the god of the garden; but the statue has fallen from its pedestal
and lies broken among the plants and weeds.  This conception
has nothing to do with materialism as it refers to materials.
The image might be made of wood; the wood might have come from
the garden; the sculptor presumably might, and probably did, allow for
the growth and grain of the wood in what he carved and expressed.
But my fable fixes the two truths of the true scripture.
The first is that the wood was graven or stamped with an image,
deliberately, and from the outside; in this case the image of God.
The second is that this image has been damaged and defaced,
so that it is now both better and worse than the mere plants
in the garden, which are perfect according to their own plan.
There is room for any amount of speculation about the history
of the tree before it was turned into an image; there is room
for any amount of doubt and mystery about what really happened
when it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount
of hope and imagination about what it will look like when it is
really mended and made into the perfect statue we have never seen.
But it has the two fixed points, that man was uplifted at the first
and fell; and to answer it by saying, "Where is the Garden of Eden?"
is like answering a philosophical Buddhist by saying, "When were you
last a donkey?"
 
The Fall is a view of life.  It is not only the only enlightening,
but the only encouraging view of life.  It holds, as against
the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist
or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused
a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one.
It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares
that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will.
Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate.
A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light
on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not
a word to say.  For instance, on the colossal contrast between
the completeness of man's machines and the continued corruption
of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems
to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last
men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest;
as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington
better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says:
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," which is only what
the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way
of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and
evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven
and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound
of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans
and sceptics:  "We look before and after, and pine for what is not";
which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very
depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness
is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory;
and that we are all kings in exile.
 
Now to people who feel that this view of life is more real, more radical,
more universal than the cheap simplifications opposed to it, it comes
with quite a shock of bathos to realise that anybody let alone a man
like Mr. Wells, supposes that it all depends on some detail about the site
of a garden in Mesopotamia, like that identified by General Gordon.
It is hard to find any parallel to such an incongruity;
for there is no real similarity between our muddled mortal
affairs and events that were divine if they were mysterious,
and scriptures that are sacred even if they are symbolical.
But some shadow of a comparison could be made out of the modern myths.
I mean the sort of myths that men like Mr. Wells generally do believe in;
such as the Myth of Magna Carta or the Myth of the Mayflower.
Now many historians will maintain that Magna Carta was really nothing
to speak of; that it was largely a piece of feudal privilege.
But suppose one of the historians who holds this view began
to argue with us excitedly about the fabulous nature of our
ordinary fancy picture of Magna Carta.  Suppose he produced maps
and documents to prove that Magna Carta was not signed at Runnymede,
but somewhere else; as I believe some scholars do maintain.
Suppose he criticised the false heraldry and fancy-dress costumes
of the ordinary sort of waxwork historical picture of the event.
We should think he was rather unduly excited about a detail of
mediaeval history.  But with what a shock of astonishment should
we realise at last that the man actually thought that all modern
attempts at democracy must be abandoned, that all representative
government must be wrong, that all Parliaments would have
to be dissolved and all political rights destroyed, if once it
were admitted that King John did not sign that special document
in that little island in the Thames!  What should we think of him,
if he really thought we had no reasons for liking law or liberty,
except the authenticity of that beloved royal signature?
That is very much how I feel when I find that Mr. Wells
really imagines that the luminous and profound philosophy
of the Fall only means that Eden was somewhere in Mesopotamia.
Now the only explanation of a great man like Mr. Wells having
a small prejudice, like this about the snake, is that he does come
of a religious tradition that regarded the text of Hebrew Scripture
as the only authority and had forgotten all about the great
mediaeval metaphysic and the discussion of fundamental ideas.
The man who does that is provincial; and there is no harm in saying
so even when he is one of the greatest men of letters and a glory
to the English name.
 
-/-
 
== THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND ==
 
THE thing that strikes me most in current controversy is that our
opponents are talking almost entirely in terms of the past, and that
an entirely dead past; whereas we are making some sort of attempt,
whether it be considered impertinent or eccentric or meddlesome
or paradoxical, to deal with the practical conditions of the present.
An amusing comedy on these lines seems to have arisen on the subject
of Scottish Nationalism or the notion of Home Rule for North Britain.
A worthy Presbyterian has warned his fellow-countrymen that
the movement is tainted by the presence of Roman Catholics,
and especially by that of Mr. Compton Mackenzie; and that no
little degree of the deadly peril is indicated by the fact that
Mr. Cunninghame Graham is interested in a book by Mr. Belloc;
in which the hideous sentiment is uttered that the Reformation
was the shipwreck of Christendom.  Personally I should have
thought it was obvious to anybody on any side, in one solid
and objective sense, that it was the shipwreck of Christendom.
I should imagine that it would be obvious to anybody, for instance,
who desires or even discusses the Reunion of Christendom.
There certainly was a united vessel or vehicle and it certainly
did break up into different parts.  Some people may think the ship
was a rotten old-fashioned three-decker that was bound to break up;
and that the people were lucky who got away from it in boats.
But it is certain that it did break up and that the boats were
not the same as the original ship.  A man might as well resent
our saying that the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the modern
nationalities was part of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
This is only one of the marks of such bigotry; but it is worth noting
at the outset.  One of the peculiarities of this sort of bigot is
that he cannot distinguish between provocative statements and plain
inevitable statements.  If I say that the Reformation was a relapse
into barbarism, a return to all that was worst in the Dark Ages
without anything of what was best in them, an idolatry of dead Hebrew
documents full of visions and symbols without any Daniel to interpret
the dreams, a stampede of brutal luxury and pride with a vulgar
howl of hot-gospelling for an excuse, a riot of thieves and looters
with a few foaming and gibbering lunatics carried in front of it
like live mascots for luck; the return of the Manichee, the dirty
ape of the ascetic, conspiring with the devil to destroy the world--
if I were to say all this I should think that these remarks
about Protestantism certainly had a slightly provocative flavour.
But if I were to say, with Mr. Belloc, that Protestantism was
the shipwreck of Christendom, I should regard it as an ordinary
historical statement, like saying that the American War
of Independence was a split in the British Empire.  The bigot
cannot see the difference between these two types of statement,
whether made by us or by himself.
 
The next interesting thing to note about the protest is that
the Protestant goes on to say that Mr. Compton Mackenzie and his
friends are going to ruin Scotland by removing the stern teaching
of John Knox, which has apparently created the Scottish character.
This seems a little hard on the Scottish character.
I cannot quite bring myself to believe that the character of Scott
or of Stevenson, the character of Burns or Barrie, are exact
and unaltered reproductions of the stern teaching of John Knox.
But before we come to any such comparisons, it is worth remarking,
on the face of the thing that a rather more living world,
a life more in touch with modern conditions, a grasp of
the actual problems of the present and the immediate future,
is rather more indicated by saying the words "Compton Mackenzie"
than by saying the words "John Knox."  Many very modern young men
have recently joined the same religion as Mr. Compton Mackenzie.
No such modern young men, that I ever heard of, have ever exhibited
the smallest desire to go back to the religion of John Knox.  As a
matter of plain fact, there is hardly one modern Scotsman in a thousand
who has the smallest sympathy with the real religion of John Knox.
He may vaguely respect John Knox as a Scottish hero, on the supposition
(quite startlingly false) that he was a Scottish patriot.
As a matter of fact, the patriotic party in Scotland was the wicked
Papistical party; Knox and his Presbyterians were all for helping
the pressure of England and Elizabeth.  They would have justified
themselves by saying that they had the one, true and only
right religion.  The question is, who is left even in Scotland
who believes that it was the one, true and only right religion?
I repeat, about one in a thousand; perhaps only a few splendidly
fanatical old Wee Frees in the Highlands.  Anybody who knows anything
of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, during the last fifty years,
knows that the prevailing doctrine taught in them has NOT been
the severe Calvinism of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries,
still less the wild Calvinism of the sixteenth.  It has been a mild
hash of Hegelian philosophy and Higher Criticism, all borrowed from
Germany and carefully learnt by Scotch students in German Universities.
And anybody who has noticed what the modern Scottish character
is really like, knows that it does not by this time (thank heaven)
bear the smallest resemblance to the sternness of John Knox.
It is rather sentimental than otherwise, though its sentiment finds
expression in more than one brilliant and admirable man of genius.
Modern Scotland is not even remotely represented by John Knox.
It is represented much more accurately, and much more honourably,
by Sir Harry Lauder and Sir James Barrie.
 
This dull habit of invoking dead things, in a world in which we
are surrounded by more and more interesting living things,
is the second mark of the sort of bigot I am describing.
It would be an extremely interesting business to write a real,
respectful and sympathetic history of the remarkable episode of
Scottish Puritanism; insisting on its integrity and its intellectual
vigour while it lasted.  But any sincere study of it must conclude
with the statement that it did not last.  One of the most brilliant
and distinguished of Scottish professors, at Edinburgh University,
himself of an origin wholly Puritan and of sympathies the very
reverse of Catholic, used to me the true and forcible expression
about the old Scottish Sabbatarianism, "It covered all Scotland;
and then one morning, it had suddenly vanished everywhere like the snow."
And though the story might be told truly from either standpoint,
or from many others, it is but natural that we should draw our own
moral from it.  And the moral is, of course, one which we find
running through the whole of our history.
 
The birth and death of every heresy has been essentially the same.
A morbid or unbalanced Catholic takes one idea out of the
thousandfold throng of Catholic ideas; and announces that
he cares for that Catholic idea more than for Catholicism.
He takes it away with him into a wilderness, where the idea becomes
an image and the image an idol.  Then, after a century or two,
he suddenly wakes up and discovers that the idol is an idol;
and, shortly after that, that the wilderness is a wilderness.
If he is a wise man, he calls himself a fool.  If he is a fool,
he calls himself an evolutionary progressive who has outgrown
the worship of idols; and he looks round him at the wilderness,
spreading bare and desolate on every side and says, in the beautiful
words of Mr. H. G. Wells:  "I see no limit to it at all."
 
That is what happened to the Calvinistic Scotsman; and the chief
comfort in the prospect is that the Scotsman is not generally a fool,
even when he has ceased to be a Calvinist.  But he very often becomes
an atheist; and the fact that so many of the hard destructive sceptics,
from Hume downwards, came from Scotland, was the early and significant
evidence of the discovery of the idol and the wilderness.
But in any case, that is the compact parable of what occurred.
The Calvinist was a Catholic whose imagination had been in some way
caught and overpowered by the one isolated theological truth of
the power and knowledge of God; and he offered to it human sacrifice,
not only of every human sentiment, but of every other divine quality.
Something in that bare idea of all-seeing, all-searching and pitiless
power intoxicated and exalted certain men for a certain period, as certain
men are intoxicated by a storm of wind or some terrible stage tragedy.
The more moderate Protestants, the Anglicans and to a large extent
the Lutherans, had something of the same queer feeling about the King.
Hence came the Cavalier doctrine of Divine Right--and the court
chaplains of Prussia.  Nothing is more intriguing and challenging
to the imagination than the necessity of trying to understand how men
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries felt a sort of
abstract altruistic joy in the mere might and triumph of the Prince;
in the mere autocracy of the earthly ruler.  The Calvinists,
to do them justice, felt it only about the heavenly ruler.
In that sense the Scots can look proudly back on their Calvinism.
But they cannot look proudly forward to Calvinism.  They really know,
as well as anybody else, that this isolated religious idea can no longer
be kept separate from all the other religious ideas to which it belongs.
The Calvinism of the Puritan is as dead as the Divine Right of
the Cavaliers; men can no longer worship the idol, whether it is
Presbyterianism or Erastianism.  They can only worship the wilderness;
which is atheism--or, as the more polite say, pantheism.
 
Whether it be called a Catholic tendency or no, all the movements
of all the sects of late have been in the direction of trying to put
together again those separate pieces that were pulled apart in the
sixteenth century.  The main feature of our time has been the fact
that one person after another has recovered one piece after another,
and added it to the new scheme by borrowing it from the old.
There is one sufficient proof that there has indeed been a shipwreck.
And that is that Robinson Crusoe has, ever since, been continually
going back to get things from the wreck.
 
-/-
 
== IF THEY HAD BELIEVED ==
 
ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their
own side.  It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest,
the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants
of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic.
Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have
had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it.
For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English
was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon
and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that,
though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over,
"English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant."
 
That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even
too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous.
It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true.
The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature
was English a long time before it was Protestant.  Even a Protestant,
if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely
English than Chaucer.  He was, in the essential national temper,
very much more English than Milton.  As a matter of fact,
the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare.
But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated,
as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct
for people with a sense of reality.  I believe that recent discoveries,
as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed
the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic.  But I need no books
and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic,
or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully
to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt
like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it.
The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay;
if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all.
It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real
and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes;
like Ronsard.  But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation,
I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages
which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.
 
But that is another and much more subtle question, which is
not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay.
In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth
of Newman's admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion
of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature;
and to make some further speculations upon the point.
And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English,
the one supreme thing that they don't know (which is what our
religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this
rather interesting historical question.  What difference would
it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they
had been Catholics?
 
Of course, the question cannot be strictly and scientifically answered;
because nobody knows what difference would be made to
anybody by any change in the circumstances of his life.
But taking the matter broadly, as a question of ideas or even
of doctrines it is worth asking as a matter of religious history.
How far did the great Protestant writers depend on Protestantism?
 
I have no intention of discussing it adequately here; and indeed
this is not so much an essay as an essay to suggest an essay.
It is, in fact, a delicate indication, to people more learned than myself,
that I am in possession of a very good title and subject for an essay.
But at least it will be safe to say that the common or conventional
impression among English people on this point is wildly wrong.
It is wrong because it imagines that purely Protestant ideas
were in some vague way the same as liberal and emancipated ideas.
And it is wrong in a more special sense, because it is founded on the
utterly false history, which supposes that the Renaissance was the same
as the Reformation.  It would be very difficult to say what English
literature owes to the Reformation as distinct from the Renaissance.
There is the splendid sincerity that inspired the plain English of Bunyan;
but even Bunyan was a sort of exception that proved the rule.
He was a Puritan; but he was emphatically not a Puritan of the Puritans.
He was a man actually suspected by his fellow Puritans, because he was
not so much a Puritan as a Christian.  It was remarked at the time,
and it has often been remarked since, that his theory is not
very sectarian by the standard of seventeenth century sects.
Among the Calvinists he was so much of a moderate, that thousands must
have read his great book without thinking about Calvinism at all.
And if we take the great scenes in his great book, the battle with
Apollyon, the Mission of Greatheart, the death of Valiant-for-the-Truth,
when all the trumpets sounded on the other side--there is really no
reason whatever why they should not have been written by a Catholic.
I do not affirm that they WOULD have been written by a Catholic,
if the course of history had left the common people Catholics;
for that is a question which nobody can possibly answer one way
or the other.  But I am speaking strictly of doctrines in their
relation to ideas and images; and there is no possible reason why
a Catholic should be prevented by his Catholicism from writing such
a story of the pilgrimage of Man and the fight to attain to God.
 
Milton in one way is an even stronger case; since he had much
more in him of Shakespeare and the Catholic Renaissance.
And I really cannot think of any deep difference that it would
have made to his poetry, as poetry, if he had followed other members
of his family in the old faith; I do not see that he need have
been much altered, except possibly by being a much jollier man.
Many will not realise this, because they insist on regarding
artistic and intellectual freedom as something that was closed
to the Catholic countries and open only to the Protestant.
But all history is in flat contradiction to this view.  The tide
of culture in the seventeenth century flowed from France to England,
not from England to France.  Milton might have been as central as
Moliere and still remained a Catholic man in a Catholic atmosphere.
Descartes the Catholic was more truly than Bacon the Protestant,
the PHILOSOPHER of rationalist science.  The experiments,
the new forms, the great names in criticism and philosophy,
appeared during the last two or three centuries quite as much
in the Catholic countries as in the Protestant, if not rather more.
England could have produced a great English literature,
as France produced a great French literature, without any change
in the ancient European religion.
 
The real test case, to be considered in some such essay,
would be a case like that of Cowper.  There you do most emphatically
have the Protestant theology; and there you do most emphatically
have the English poetry.  But the two have precious little to do
with each other; until the coming of that dark hour when the theology
destroyed the poetry.  Poor Cowper's Calvinism drove him mad;
and only his poetry managed for some time to keep him sane.
But there was nothing whatever either in the poetry or the
sanity that could have prevented him from being a Catholic.
On the contrary, he was exactly the sort of man who would have been
very happy as a Catholic.  He was the sort of man to have been
devoted to the memory of St. Francis, if he had ever heard of him;
and there was nothing to prevent the one any more than the other
from keeping pet birds or stroking wild hares out of the woods.
It was the brutal blow of Calvin, two centuries before, that broke
the heart of that natural saint; and it is not the least of his crimes.
 
After the time of Cowper, there does indeed begin to appear another
type of difficulty; but it is not the presence but rather the absence
of Protestant theology.  There were elements even in Burns and Byron,
there were still more elements in Shelley and Swinburne, which would
doubtless have been at issue with their Catholic tradition,
if they had had it.  But it would not have been a revolt against
Catholicism half so much as it was a revolt against Protestantism.
In so far as they tended to mere scepticism, they could have found their
way to it more quickly from reading Rabelais and Montaigne in a Catholic
country than from reading Shakespeare and Milton in a Protestant one.
As soon as the Revolution has begun, in a sense as soon as
the Romantic Movement has begun, the positive Puritan theology
is left behind even more completely than the mediaeval theology.
Indeed the Romantics did develop a faint and hazy sympathy,
if not with mediaeval theology, at least with mediaeval religion.
It is true that Byron or Hugo probably preferred an abbey
to be a ruined abbey; but they would not have visited a Baptist
chapel even for the pleasure of seeing it ruined.  It is true
that Scott advised us to see mediaeval Melrose by moonlight;
with the delicate implication that the mediaeval religion was moonshine.
But he would not in any case have wanted to see Exeter Hall by gaslight;
and he would have thought its theology not moonshine but gas.
The tributes which he occasionally forces himself to make to the official
Puritanism of his own country are, it will be generally agreed,
the most sullen and insincere words to be found in his works.
On the negative side, therefore, the conclusion is altogether negative.
It is very difficult to find, at least after the doubtful case
of Bunyan and the deadly case of Cowper, anything that can
be called a purely literary inspiration coming from the purely
Protestant doctrines.  There is plenty of inspiration coming more
or less indirectly from Paganism; but after the first excitement,
hardly any from Protestantism.
 
If this is true on the negative side, it is even truer on
the positive side.  I take it that the imaginative magnificence of
Milton's epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been
much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound
mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels,
and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods.
PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed
to be an immortal religious poem.  Those are most happy
in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod.
It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction
now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw.
I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have
taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems
of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems
of a dead feudalism.  For him it was the habit that made the monk;
but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there
had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside
the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln.
"English literature will always have been Protestant"; but it
might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature,
and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and
a happier England.
 
-/-
 
== PEACE AND THE PAPACY ==
 
THERE is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence,
though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion;
"If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him."
It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which
St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith.
Some of the modern critics of his faith, especially the Protestant
critics of it, have fallen into an amusing error, chiefly through
ignorance of Latin and of the old use of the word DIVUS,
and have accused Catholics of describing the Pope as God.
Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God
as to call a grasshopper the Pope.  But there is a sense in which
they do recognise an eternal correspondence between the position
of the King of Kings in the universe and of his Viceroy in the world,
like the correspondence between a real thing and its shadow;
a similarity something like the damaged and defective similarity
between God and the image of God.  And among the coincidences
of this comparison may be classed the case of this epigram.
The world will more and more find itself in a position in which
even politicians and practical men will find themselves saying,
"If the Pope had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him."
 
It is not at all impossible that they may really try to invent him.
The truth is that multitudes of them would already accept the Pope
if he were not called the Pope.  I firmly believe that it would
be quite possible, in this and many other matters, to play a sort
of pious practical joke on large numbers of heretics and heathens.
I fancy it would be quite feasible to describe in accurate
but abstract terms the general idea of an office or obligation,
which would exactly correspond to the position of the Papacy
in history, and which would be accepted on ethical and social ground
by numbers of Protestants and free-thinkers; until they discovered
with a reaction of rage and astonishment that they had been
entrapped into accepting the international arbitration of the Pope.
Suppose somebody were to advance the old idea as if it were
a new idea; suppose he were to say; "I propose that there be
erected in some central city in the more civilised part of our
civilisation the seat of a permanent official to represent peace
and the basis of agreement among all the surrounding nations;
let him be by the nature of his post set apart from them all and yet
sworn to consider the rights and wrongs of all; Let him be put there
as a judge to expound an ethical law and system of social relations;
let him be of a certain type and training different from that
which encourages the ordinary ambitions of military glory or even
the ordinary attachments of tribal tradition; let him be protected
by a special sentiment from the pressure of kings and princes;
let him be sworn in a special manner to the consideration of men as men."
There are not a few already, and there will soon be many more,
who would be perfectly capable of proposing such an ideal international
institution on their own account; there are also many who would really,
in their innocence, suppose that it had never been attempted before.
 
It is true that as yet large numbers of such social reformers would
shrink from the idea of the institution being an individual.
But even that prejudice is weakening under the wear and tear of real
political experience.  We may be attached, as many of us are,
to the democratic ideal; but most of us have already realised
that direct democracy, the only true democracy which satisfies
a true democrat, is a thing applicable to some things and not others;
and not applicable at all to a question such as this.  The actual
speaking voice of a vast international civilisation, or of a vast
international religion, will not in any case be the actual articulate
distinguishable voices or cries of all the millions of the faithful.
It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope;
it is some synod or bench of bishops.  It is not an alternative
between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy
and oligarchy.  And, being myself one of the democratic idealists,
I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter
forms of privilege.  A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men;
it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent
and large enough to be irresponsible.  A man in the position
of a Pope, unless he is literally mad, must be responsible.
But aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other;
and yet create a common and corporate society from which
is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world.
These are conclusions to which many people in the world are coming;
and many who would still be much astonished and horrified to find
where those conclusions lead.  But the point here is that even
if our civilisation does not rediscover the need of a Papacy,
it is extremely likely that sooner or later it will try to supply
the need of something like a Papacy; even if it tries to do it
on its own account.  That will be indeed an ironical situation.
The modern world will have set up a new Anti-Pope, even if, as in
Monsignor Benson's romance, the Anti-Pope has rather the character
of an Antichrist.
 
The point is that men will attempt to put some sort of moral power
out of the reach of material powers.  It is the weakness of many
worthy and well-meaning attempts at international justice just now,
that the international council can hardly help being merely
a microcosm or model of the world outside it, with all its little
things and big things, including the things that are much too big.
Suppose that in the international interchanges of the future some power,
say Sweden, is felt to be disproportionate or problematical.
If Sweden is powerful in Europe, she will be powerful in the council
of Europe.  If Sweden is too powerful in Europe, she will be too
powerful in the council of Europe.  And because she is the very
thing that is irresistible, she is the very thing to be resisted;
or at any rate to be restrained.  I do not see how Europe can ever
escape from that logical dilemma, except by discovering again
an authority that is purely moral and is the recognised custodian
of a morality.  It may very reasonably be said that even those
dedicated to that duty may not always practise what they profess.
But the other rulers of the world are not even bound to profess it.
 
Again and again in history, especially in mediaeval history,
the Papacy has intervened in the interests of peace and humanity;
just as the greatest saints have thrown themselves between
the swords and daggers of contending factions.  But if there
had been no Papacy and no saints and no Catholic Church at all,
the world left to itself would certainly not have substituted social
abstractions for theological creeds.  As a whole, humanity has
been far from humanitarian.  If the world had been left to itself,
let us say in the age of feudalism, all the decisions would
have been rigidly and ruthlessly on the lines of feudalism.
There was only one institution in that world that had existed
before feudalism.  There was only one institution which could possibly
carry on some faint memory of the Republic and the Roman Law.
If the world had been left to itself in the time of the Renaissance
and the Italian statecraft of the Prince, it would have been arranged
entirely in the current fashion of the glorification of princes.
There was only one institution that could at any moment be moved
to repeat, "Put not your trust in princes."  Had it been absent,
the only result would have been that the famous settlement of
CUJUS REGIO EJUS RELIGIO would have been all REGIO with precious
little RELIGIO.  And so, of course, our own day has its unconscious
dogmas and its universal prejudices; and it needs a special,
a sacred and what seems to many an inhuman separation to stand
above them or to see beyond.
 
I know that this ideal has been abused like any other; I only
say that even those who most denounce the reality will probably
begin again to search for the ideal.  But I do not, in fact,
propose that any such spiritual tribunal should act like a legal
tribunal or be given powers of practical interference with normal
and national government.  I am quite sure, for one thing,
that it would never accept any such material entanglement.
Nor do I, for that matter, desire that any of the secular tribunals
now set up in the interests of international peace should thus
have the power to interfere with nationality and local liberty.
I would much rather give such power to a pope than to politicians
and diplomatists of the sort to whom the world is giving it.
But I do not want to give it to anybody and the authority in question
does not want to accept it from anybody.  The thing of which I speak
is purely moral and cannot exist without a certain moral loyalty;
it is a thing of atmosphere and even in a sense of affection.
There is no space to describe here the manner in which such
a general popular attachment grows up; but there is no doubt
whatever that it did once grow up round such a religious
centre of our civilisation; and that it is not likely to grow
up again except for something which aims at a higher standard
of humility and charity than the ordinary standard of the world.
Men cannot have an affection for other people's emperors,
or even for other people's politicians; they have sometimes been
known to cool in affection even for their own politicians.
I see no prospect of any such positive nucleus of amity except in some
positive enthusiasm for something that moves the deepest parts of man's
moral nature; something which can unite us not (as the prigs say)
by being entirely international, but by being universally human.
Men cannot agree about nothing any more than they can disagree
about nothing.  And anything wide enough to make such an agreement
must itself be wider than the world.
 
-/-
 
== THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS ==
 
I HAVE rather rashly undertaken to write of the Spirit of Christmas;
and it presents a preliminary difficulty about which I must be candid.
People are very curious nowadays in their way of talking
about "the spirit" of a thing.  There is, for example,
a particular sort of prig who is always lecturing us about having
the spirit of true Christianity, apart from all names and forms.
As far as I can make out, he means the very opposite of what he says.
He means that we are to go on using the names "Christian"
and "Christianity," and so on, for something in which it is quite
specially the spirit that is not Christian; something that is a sort
of combination of the baseless optimism of an American atheist
with the pacifism of a mild Hindoo.  In the same way, we read
a great deal about the Spirit of Christmas in modern journalism
or commercialism; but it is really a reversal of the same kind.
So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is
rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials.
It means taking two mere material substances, like holly and mistletoe,
and spreading them all over huge and homeless cosmopolitan hotels
or round the Doric columns of impersonal clubs full of jaded
and cynical old gentlemen; or in any other place where the actual
spirit of Christmas is least likely to be.  But there is also
another way in which modern commercial complexity eats out the heart
of the thing, while actually leaving the painted shell of it.
And that is the much too elaborate system of dependence on buying
and selling, and therefore on bustle and hustle; and the actual
neglect of the new things that might be done by the old Christmas.
 
Normally, if anything were normal nowadays, it would seem a truism to say
that Christmas has been a family festival.  But it is now possible
(as I have had the good or bad luck to discover) to earn a reputation
for paradox simply by going on saying that truisms are true.
In this case, of course, the reason, the only reasonable reason,
was religious.  It was concerned with a happy family because it
was consecrated to the Holy Family.  But it is perfectly true
that many men saw the fact without specially feeling the reason.
When we say the root was religious, we do not mean that Sam Weller
was concentrated on theological values when he told the Fat Boy
to "put a bit of Christmas," into some object, probably edible.
We do not mean that the Fat Boy had gone into a trance of mystical
contemplation like a monk seeing a vision.  We do not even mean
that Bob Cratchit defended punch by saying he was only looking
on the wine when it was yellow; or that Tiny Tim quoted Timothy.
We only mean that they, including their author, would have confessed
humbly and heartily that there was someone historically quite anterior
to Mr. Scrooge, who might be called the Founder of the Feast.
But in any case, whatever the reason, all would have agreed about
the result.  Mr. Wardle's feast centred in Mr. Wardle's family;
and none the less because the romantic shadows of Mr. Winkle
and Mr. Snodgrass threatened to break it up for the formation
of other families.
 
The Christmas season is domestic; and for that reason most people
now prepare for it by struggling in tramcars, standing in queues,
rushing away in trains, crowding despairingly into tea-shops,
and wondering when or whether they will ever get home.
I do not know whether some of them disappear for ever in the toy
department or simply lie down and die in the tea-rooms; but by
the look of them, it is quite likely.  Just before the great festival
of the home the whole population seems to have become homeless.
It is the supreme triumph of industrial civilisation that,
in the huge cities which seem to have far too many houses,
there is a hopeless shortage of housing.  For a long time past
great numbers of our poor have become practically nomadic.
We even confess the fact; for we talk of some of them as Street Arabs.
But this domestic institution, in its present ironical phase,
has gone beyond such normal abnormality.  The feast of the
family turns the rich as well as the poor into vagabonds.
They are so scattered over the bewildering labyrinth of our traffic
and our trade, that they sometimes cannot even reach the tea-shop;
it would be indelicate, of course, to mention the tavern.
They have a difficulty in crowding into their hotels, let alone
separating to reach their houses.  I mean quite the reverse
of irreverence when I say that their only point of resemblance
to the archetypal Christmas family is that there is no room for them
at the inn.
 
Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox;
that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
But the other sort of paradox is not intentional and is certainly
not beautiful.  It is bad enough that we cannot altogether
disentangle the tragedy of poverty.  It is bad enough that the birth
of the homeless, celebrated at hearth and altar, should sometimes
synchronise with the death of the homeless in workhouses and slums.
But we need not rejoice in this universal restlessness brought upon
rich and poor alike; and it seems to me that in this matter we need
a reform of the modern Christmas.
 
I will now emit another brilliant flash of paradox by remarking
that Christmas occurs in the winter.  That is, it is not only a
feast dedicated to domesticity, but it is one deliberately placed
under the conditions in which it is most uncomfortable to rush
about and most natural to stop at home.  But under the complicated
conditions of modern conventions and conveniences, there arises
this more practical and much more unpleasant sort of paradox.
People have to rush about for a few weeks, if it is only to stay
at home for a few hours.  Now the old and healthy idea of such winter
festivals was this; that people being shut in and besieged by the
weather were driven back on their own resources; or, in other words,
had a chance of showing whether there was anything in them.
It is not certain that the reputation of our most fashionable
modern pleasure-seekers would survive the test.  Some dreadful
exposures would be made of some such brilliant society favourites,
if they were cut off from the power of machinery and money.
They are quite used to having everything done for them; and even
when they go to the very latest American dances, it seems to be
mostly the Negro musicians who dance.  But anyhow, on the average
of healthy humanity I believe the cutting off of all these mechanical
connections would have a thoroughly enlivening and awakening effect.
At present they are always accused of merely amusing themselves;
but they are doing nothing so noble or worthy of their human dignity.
Most of them by this time cannot amuse themselves; they are too used
to being amused.
 
Christmas might be creative.  We are told, even by those who praise
it most, that it is chiefly valuable for keeping up ancient customs
or old-fashioned games.  It is indeed valuable for both those
admirable purposes.  But in the sense of which I am now speaking it
might once more be possible to turn the truth the other way round.
It is not so much old things as new things that a real Christmas
might create.  It might, for instance, create new games, if people
were really driven to invent their own games.  Most of the very
old games began with the use of ordinary tools or furniture.
So the very terms of tennis were founded on the framework of the old
inn courtyard.  So, it is said, the stumps in cricket were originally
only the three legs of the milking-stool. Now we might invent new
things of this kind, if we remembered who is the mother of invention.
How pleasing it would be to start a game in which we scored so much
for hitting the umbrella-stand or the dinner-wagon, or even the host
and hostess; of course, with a missile of some soft material.
Children who are lucky enough to be left alone in the nursery
invent not only whole games, but whole dramas and life-stories
of their own; they invent secret languages; they create
imaginary families; they laboriously conduct family magazines.
That is the sort of creative spirit that we want in the modern world;
want both in the sense of desiring and in the sense of lacking it.
If Christmas could become more domestic, instead of less, I believe
there would be a vast increase in the real Christmas spirit;
the spirit of the Child.  But in indulging this dream we must once
more invert the current convention into the form of a paradox.
It is true in a sense that Christmas is the time at which the doors
should be open.  But I would have the doors shut at Christmas,
or at least just before Christmas; and then the world shall see
what we can do.
 
I cannot but remember, with something of a smile, that on an earlier
and more controversial page of this book I have mentioned a lady
who shuddered at the thought of the things perpetrated by my
co-religionists behind closed doors.  But my memory of it is mellowed
by distance and the present subject, and I feel quite the reverse
of controversial.  I hope that lady, and all of her way of thinking,
may also have the wisdom to close their doors; and discover that only
when all the doors are closed the best thing will be found inside.
If they are Puritans, whose religion is only based on the Bible,
let it for once indeed be a Family Bible.  If they are Pagans, who can
accept nothing but the winter feast, let it at least be a family feast.
The discordance or discomfort complained of by modern critics,
in the family reunion, is not due to that mystical focal fire
having been left burning, but to its having been left to go cold.
It is because cold fragments of a once living thing are clumsily
lumped together; it is no argument against making the thing alive.
Christmas toys are incongruously dangled before heavy and heathen uncles
who wish they were playing golf.  But that does not alter the fact
that they might become much brighter and more intelligent if they
knew how to play with toys; and they are horrible bores about golf.
Their dullness is only the last deadly product of the mechanical
progress of organised and professional sports, in that rigid
world of routine outside the home.  When they were children,
behind closed doors in the home, it is probable that nearly every
one of them had day-dreams and unwritten dramas that belonged to them
as much as Hamlet belonged to Shakespeare or Pickwick to Dickens.
How much more thrilling it would be if Uncle Henry, instead of
describing in detail all the strokes with which he ought to have got
out of the bunker, were to say frankly that he had been on a voyage
to the end of the world and had just caught the Great Sea-Serpent.
How much more truly intellectual would be the conversation of
Uncle William if, instead of telling us the point to which he had
reduced his handicap, he could still say with conviction that he was
King of the Kangaroo Islands, or Chief of the Rango Dango Redskins.
These things, projected from within, were in almost all human spirits;
and it is not normal that the inspiration of them should be so utterly
crushed by the things without.  Let it not be supposed for a moment
that I also am among the tyrants of the earth, who would impose my
own tastes, or force all the other children to play my own games.
I have no disrespect for the game of golf; it is an admirable game.
I have played it; or rather, I have played at it, which is generally
regarded as the very opposite.  By all means let the golfers golf
and even the organisers organise, if their only conception of an organ
is something like a barrel-organ. Let them play golf day after day;
let them play golf for three hundred and sixty-four days, and nights
as well, with balls dipped in luminous paint, to be pursued in the dark.
But let there be one night when things grow luminous from within:
and one day when men seek for all that is buried in themselves,
and discover, where she is indeed hidden, behind locked gates
and shuttered windows, and doors thrice barred and bolted,
the spirit of liberty.

Latest revision as of 10:53, 27 May 2008

The Thing
written by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
1929.




This work is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.


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