THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY

EVERY NOW and again in the long and weary history of literature and journalism something is said that is important, something that blows a trumpet and calls a halt. For the first time, perhaps for many years we have suddenly to stop and think. There remains the essential difference between a sentence that is read once and a sentence that is read twice. Now, one of these arresting and transfiguring hints can be found in Hilaire Belloc's The Historic Thames. He says it was a mere accident of history that the phrase Westminster Abbey does not sound to us today like the phrase Welbeck Abbey. It would give the modern English a great shock if Westminster Abbey were turned into a suite of rooms for the Duke of Westminster. Yet it gives them no shock that Welbeck Abbey should be turned into a suite of rooms for the Duke of Portland. Yet God was worshipped, I suppose, in Welbeck Abbey as well as in Westminster Abbey. The first fact about Westminster Abbey, considered as a religious institution, is as simple as it is sardonic. It is the great religious institution of the Middle Ages that managed to survive.

The whole of this theme is, of course, subject to exaggeration on both sides. One of the ablest men I have ever known summed up all the tombs at Westminster which tourists go to see in the curt and confident formula: "Westminster Abbey is to be venerated, not because of those that sleep therein, but rather in spite of them." Many may call this a harsh paradox; but if they walk round the Abbey seriously and slowly, and really observe what petty politicians and third-rate generals have cumbered the ground there with their cold and clumsy monuments, I do not think that they will wholly deny the truth of that idle but bitter jest. A very great part of the funereal art in the Abbey can really be expressed only by one of those colossal epigrams which can be found in the Gospels more than anywhere else. It is, indeed, such statuary as would be made by the dead burying their dead.

It is true that anyone knowing the savour either of England or Christianity will have the religious emotion as well as the patriotic by the low Gothic tomb of Chaucer. But this, if it be examined, is an exception that proves the rule. For Chaucer was buried there when the popular Christianity of the Middle Ages still coloured this church like all others. It would be appropriate in any case that Chaucer should be in Westminster Abbey, even if it were exactly what it was when he used to look out of his London window at its towers. But it would be far more appropriate if men like Pitt or Macaulay were buried in St. Paul's Cathedral; the new Renaissance St. Paul's, which seems built as a pantheon for the heathen but heroic aristocrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Florid pillars and posturing statues are appropriate to them; most of them died rather defying death than looking for immortality. And it is really a part of their patriotic, but not Christian spirit that their figures should, as it were, stand frozen for ever in same gesture of eloquence or pride. No imaginative person will wholly fail to respond to the emotion expressed about a murdered Renaissance prince by a great English Renaissance poet:

He is there Up like a Roman statue and will stand Till dawn has made him marble.

But to Chaucer all this would have been utterly incomprehensible in connection with a church. In that connection he would have thought it as insolent and vulgar as a waxwork show. For he lived before the great lords had become the legend of England, instead of the great saints. Chaucer, whatever his own faults or vanities might be, would certainly have been the first to admit that it was the Abbey that sanctified his dust and not his dust that sanctified the Abbey. He would not have thought of it as a gallery or public record office where the names and deeds of great poets could be found, though it is likely enough that he knew he was a great poet, and even, among his worldly acquaintances, warmly insisted on the fact. He would have thought of the Abbey as a refuge, where a poor old sinner named Geoffrey Chaucer might feel a little more comfortable in the Dies Irae. I am not here choosing by ethical preference between the two attitudes; still less do I despise either one or the other. The name of Nelson, for instance, will always be not only an inspiring but, properly understood, a purifying name. And it seems quite appropriate for Nelson, in his own time, type, station and tradition, to cry out, "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" meaning by Westminster Abbey merely glory and death. But I doubt if Chaucer could have been made to understand what a peerage could possibly have to do with Westminster Abbey. Warriors at least as valiant and victorious as Nelson were buried in Chaucer's daythe Black Prince, for instance. Warriors at least as valiant and victorious as Nelson were buried at Westminster in the Middle AgesHenry V, for instance. But when their images were carved on their tombs at all they were carved with closed eyes and hands pointed in prayer. And I have seen one such monument, in Salisbury Cathedral, I think, in which the man lies in dumb supplication, but the dog at his feet has risen erect and watchful, having heard the trumpet of God. It has nothing to do with men being religious men in the modern sense, or even with their being good men. It is a matter of a great popular religion which never affects anybody except when it affects everybody. King John would have been quite incapable of imagining himself exhibited in a church in any other attitude.

I am not here discussing, of course, anything about the ecclesiastical changes as they affect theology; still less should I dream of saying that the spirit Chaucer would have understood did not continue at all in the Anglican Church after the spoliation of the monasteries. It continued markedly in George Herbert, and most unmistakably in Bishop Ken. But all that is a controversy with which, fortunately, we are not here concerned. My point for the moment is purely political; I say that the rise of England into a great modern nation, the particular kind of aristocracy that ruled it while it rose; the greater severance for various reasons from the other European nations, and everything that culminated in the victorious war against Napoleon and the established peace of Queen VictoriaI say that all this did, in fact, produce a type of public spirit and public art in which the old religious significance of the Abbey sometimes almost disappeared. The idea increased that Westminster Abbey was a pantheon, more sensible, but no less secular, than the absurd Valhalla that the Kaiser had at Berlin, where some petty Teuton prince was represented as a giant and Goethe put beside him as a pigmy. That singular mixture of humour and shame which is the English temperament, saved us from doing anything so bad as that. Our statues, at the worst, were only conspicuous by being bad statues, like the old statue of the Duke of Wellington. At the best, they are conspicuous by not being there at all, like the new statue of Shakespeare. But there was enough of this parade of pompous sculpture to confuse or hide the spiritual meaning of Westminster Abbey, and sometimes even its architectural style. We talk of not being able to see the wood for the trees. It may be said that people cannot in this case see the church for the tombs.

All that the Abbey meant to the ethics and atmosphere of this island from its earliest foundations is a thing not easy to state to the average modern reader. For the average modern reader, however well educated, is always taught the tale of the early Middle Ages in such a way that it makes no sense. This is because the main concern of the Middle Ages was the same as the main concern of this article; and it is almost always entirely left out. To take one working instance at random, the ordinary schoolboy of a good school, such as the school I went to, is always told, and therefore naturally believes, that Richard Coeur de Lion was a romantic and irresponsible ne'er-do-well who went away to the Crusades for the same reason that an adventurer takes the King's shilling or a schoolboy runs away to seaan itch for fighting or an impatience of honest work. Now, whatever Richard's temperament may have been (and, no doubt, it was adventurous) this explanation simply does not cover the facts. Especially it does not cover these two factsthat John, who stopped to rule, was quite as fond of fighting as Richard, and did it very well; and that Philip Augustus of France, who went on the Crusade with Richard, was not particularly fond of fighting, and would very much have liked to stop and rule. The key that is lost here is simply a little thing called the Christian religion, in which all these men, good and bad, believed, and which was in a mortal peril from which the Christian peoples simply expected their Kings to defend it. Now, we could find a somewhat similar instance of the religious element being missed, and the whole business being therefore unmeaning, in the earlier history of Westminster Abbey. The usual way of writing in England about the times before and after the Norman Conquest is to represent it at best as what Carlyle called a "rude stalwart age"; an age of crowned freebooters, who neither asked nor gave mercy; an age of race conquering race with a sort of savage fair play and a more or less useful settlement; in short, a time when instincts laid a foundation on which ethics had yet to build. Anyone taking this ordinary heathen and dynastic view of the business would see something very fierce and final in the coincidence which Freeman maintained, that the Saxon Harold was crowned in Westminster Abbey almost immediately before he was killed at Hastings, and that the victorious Duke of Normandy was certainly crowned in Westminster Abbey almost immediately afterwards. The blood and iron theory of the Dark Ages would see in this the overwhelming of a race by a race; the soft, unguarded Saxons with their soft, unguarded King, Edward the Confessor, swept to nowhere by a raid of aliens clad in iron, appealing to nothing but force, and caring nothing for England. But the person holding this theory would instantly be pulled up short, and extremely puzzled by the discovery that the next really important thing that happened in Westminster Abbey after the Normans were in full possession of it was the canonization of Edward the Confessor. Stated in the modern manner, his difficulty would stand something like this: What made a number of William's own Norman bishops, French gentlemen like any other, join in glorifying the memory of an old fool who had failed to save the Saxons from the victorious arms of their own uncles and cousins? Why should mere strong men, mere victors, bow down to the very weakest man of the defeated party and the subject race? Here, again, the key is always left out; the real explanation is never given. It will be found in the title of this article.

It was based, in short, on one broad and simple fact, which will seem almost incredible to people living in an age when religion is generally the product of a specially religious temperament. The fact was, to put it shortly, that though William the Conqueror had taken Edward the Confessor's land, he did, in all probability, really regard Edward the Confessor as his superior. These fighting men of the Dark Ages were very fierce; but they did really think, ideally speaking, that it would be better if they were very gentle.

They were all soldiers; they would all have agreed that soldiers were inferior to saints. If we say of the men in the ages during which the Abbey was first erected, that they did not curb their coarse and cruel appetites, that in so far as they were tyrants and usurpers they went on being tyrants and usurpers, we shall probably be right. But if we read into them a modern philosophy of force, and imagine that they despised monks or despised meekness, we shall be exactly as wrong as if we supposed that all City men despise a soldier for having been fool enough to have gone under fire. Christianity was to these men exactly what patriotism is to modern Englishmen; the one sacred bond which even the most evil men would not like to own they had betrayed.

This fact of the old and real religious sentiment about the Abbey can be illustrated by any one out of the ten or twenty most famous things in it. Take the case of two celebrated men of the later Middle Ages, a father and a son, who were perhaps as responsible as anyone for the last turn taken by the medieval civilization in England, and who are both more or less connected with the place. I mean Henry IV, called Bolingbroke, and his son, the victor of Agincourt. There is nobody who has heard of Westminster Abbey who has not heard of the Jerusalem Chamber. There may even be few who have heard of the Jerusalem Chamber who have not been told by same guide-book or cicerone that Henry of Bolingbroke died there. But I think there are very much fewer people who would instantly remember (though the fact is known, of course, to all students of such things) that this very selfish, cynical and materialistic usurper found a strange spiritual comfort in dying in the Jerusalem Chamber, because it seemed to him a half fulfillment of a vow which had haunted his life, a vow to die or recover Jerusalem. The sentiment, in fact, was almost exactly the same as had moved a much more heroic man in a much more heroic medieval period, King Robert Bruce, to send his best warrior out of a much-menaced country, to carry his heart to the Holy Land, since he himself had never managed to carry there his powerful body and his powerful brain. To such men West minster Abbey was not a national and finally satisfying thing. To such men Westminster Abbey was even a pis aller. When we have understood that, we have some glimpse of that burning concentration of the Christian conscience which made the Christendom of the Middle Ages almost one nation. But when modern humanitarians talk of international solidarity and the need for a United States of Europe, I do not notice that they give much praise to the Popes and the Crusades who so nearly made it a reality.

The case of Henry V carries me back to an instance of which I am not so sure, and of which I have not the details by me. But I am certain that I read in some quarter of competent learning and authority that Henry V's entry into Paris was marked by proceedings which would very much astonish any good modern English poet, if he were called upon to write a patriotic poem on the event. To do these modern men of genius justice, I think it would have considerably surprised Shakespeare himself, for though Shakespeare was unquestionably in sympathy with the medieval type of religion in such vital matters as the admission or the purgation of sin, the note of international and European Christianity had been somewhat lost even by his time. In the account I read, so far as I remember, the principal interest displayed by Henry V entering Paris after Agincourt was a strong desire to pay homage to the various relics of celebrated saints which were preserved in that city. So that the conqueror of France, though in many ways a rather exceptionally rude and ruthless conqueror may almost be said to have passed a considerable part of his triumphal progress on his knees. These are the things (and I could give twenty other instances with more certainty and exactitude than I can give this one) which really strike the note of the extraordinary and universal conviction of medieval men, and exactly what the men who really made the Abbey would have meant by its religious aspect.

I am not writing controversially and I do not desire in this place to diminish the credit of the Imperial type of patriotism, but in the matter of spiritual atmospheres it is not untrue to say that if Chaucer or even Sackville, had read Mr. Kipling's poetry and understood it they would simply not have been able to make head or tail of what he meant when he said:

The hush of the dread high altar Where the Abbey makes us We.

They would not have been able to understand how a vague Darwinian like Cecil Rhodes, who called a lonely hill in Africa "his church", could have anything to do with the Abbey at all. It is not necessary to take so extreme a view in order to see that the two alternative courses which the religion of Western Europe may take are in a certain sense symbolized in the position of the Abbey today. At this moment the secular and the religious aspects of the institution are still more or less balanced. But under the searching light of spiritual tragedies, which more and more divide the nations into the friends and the enemies of the old proclamation of Constantine, the institution will almost certainly become more of one thing or more of the other. Our religion will either become more and more what the religion of the old Roman poets and historians so largely became, a certain savour of sanctity clinging round the emblems of patriotism and civic pride, so that the tattered flags above the altar will be at last more sacred than the altar itself. Or it will become more and more what that mysterious energy was before which the Roman religion of the poets and the historians perisheda voice out of the catacombs and a cry from the Cross.

The Religious Aim of Education

By G.K. Chesterton

From The Torchbearer, 1925

It is only by a definite and even deliberate narrowing of the mind that we can keep religion out of education. I do not deny that it may in certain cases be the least of many evils; that it may be a sort of loyalty to a political compromise; that it is certainly better than a political injustice. But secular education is a limitation, if it be only a self-limitation. The natural thing is to say what you think about nature; and especially, so to speak, about the nature of nature. The first and most obvious thing that a person is interested in is what sort of world he is living in; and why he is living in it. If you do not know, of course, you will not be able to say; but the mere fact of not being able to answer the question that the other person is most likely to ask, may or may not be what some people call education, but it is not a very brilliant exhibition of instruction. If you have convictions upon these cosmic and fundamental things, whether negative or positive, you are an instructor who is on one most important point refusing to instruct. Your motive may be generous, or it may be merely timid; but certainly it is not in itself educational.

It is sometimes said that the devotees of a doctrinal religion, who are so often depicted as donkeys, are in matters of this kind wearing blinkers. The word is not wisely chosen by the critics; and in one sense is much more applicable to the critic himself. The man who teaches authoritative answers to ultimate questions, even if he only says that Mumbo Jumbo made the world out of a pumpkin, may be dogmatizing or persecuting or tyrannically laying down the law about everything, but he is not blinking anything. He is not wearing blinkers, which implies deliberately limiting the field of his own vision. His vision may be in our view an illusion; but if it is very vivid to him, we cannot blame him for describing it; and anyhow he is describing the whole of it. If there is such a thing in the world as a donkey deliberately wearing blinkers, it is the enlightened educationist who is always making a nervous effort to keep out of his task of imparting knowledge any reference to the things that men from the beginning of the world have most wanted to know. Nor are those things mere hole-and-corner objects of a special curiosity. Whether or no they can ever be known, they are not only worth knowing, but they are the simplest and most elementary sort of knowledge. It is a good thing that children should fully realize that there is an objective world outside them, as solid as the lamp-post out in the street. But even when we make the lamp-post quite objective, it is not unnatural to ask what is its object. A naturalist, noting the common objects of the street, may observe many facts and put them down in a note-book. A bicyclist may bump into a lamp-post; a tramp may lean against a lamp-post; a drunkard may embrace a lamp-post or even in a lighter moment try to climb a lamp-post. But it is not a strange or specialist sort of knowledge to note about a lamp-post that it has a lamp.

Now secular education really means that everybody shall make a point of looking down at the pavement, lest by some fatal chance somebody should look up at the lamp. The lamp of faith that did in fact illuminate the street for the mass of mankind in most ages of history, was not only a wandering fire seen floating in the air by visionaries; it was also for most people the explanation of the post. If a low cloud like a London fog must indeed cover that flame, then it is an objective fact that the object will remain chiefly as an object to be bumped into. I am not blaming anybody who can only manage to regard the world in that highly objective light. Even if the lamp-post appears as a post without a lamp, and therefore a post without a purpose, it may be possible to take different views of it. The stoic, like the tramp, may lean on it; the optimist, like the drunkard, may embrace it; the progressive may attempt to climb it, and so on. So it is with those who merely bump into a headless world as into a lampless post; to whom the world is a large objective obstacle. I only say that there is a difference, and not a small or secondary difference, between those who know and those who do not know what the post is for.

The deepest of all desires for knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for. Those who believe they can answer that question must at least be allowed to answer it as the first question and not as the last. A man who cannot answer it has a right to refuse to answer it; though perhaps he is rather too prone to comfort himself with the very dogmatic dogma that nobody else can answer it if he can't. But no man has a right to answer it, or even to arrange for it being answered, as if it were a sort of peculiar and pedantic additional question, which only a peculiar and pedantic sort of pupil would be likely to ask. Secular education is more sensible than making religion one of the extras; like learning fret-work or Portuguese. And this principle is important in the controversy about religious education, because it involves the whole question which was so prominent in the controversy, the question of what is called 'atmosphere'. All that it means is, that anybody who has a right to answer this question has a right to answer it as if it were the sort of question that it is; a question affecting the nature of the whole world and the purpose of every part of human life. If a man is to teach religion, it is absurd to ask him to teach it as if it were something else, that did not apply to all the activities of man. The expression 'a religious hour' is something very like a contradiction in terms. And it is amusing to note that the same casual sceptic who is always sneering at the orthodox for their forms and limitations, who is always talking of their Sunday religion and their separation of things sacred and profane, is generally the very man who is most ready to make fun of the idea of a religious atmosphere in the schools. That is to say he of all people objects most to sacred and profane things being united and to a religion that works on week-days as well as on Sundays. The truth is that the idea of atmosphere is simply a piece of the elementary psychology of children. In any other matter, these people would be the first to tell us that education must take note of all the influences forming the mind, however apparently light or accidental. They will go wild with dismay if the child has to look at the wrong wall-paper; they will set themselves seriously to see that he has the right picture of the wombat; but they tell us not to trouble whether he has the right picture of the world.

I am not implying, of course, that there is no value in a secular social enthusiasm; or even that, in the language that some use sincerely and even usefully, it may not deserve to be called religion. What I doubt is whether it can in this sense deserve to be called reason. It does not satisfy the primary intellectual hunger about the meaning of life, that certain people may mean well, even when they doubt whether it means anything. The truth is that there is implied in almost all idealism a number of ideas which the idealists have seldom really followed out as ideas. There is the notion of a choice that is mysteriously offered and followed by equally mysterious consequences; of a mystical value attached to one part of our nature without any authority to value it; of a sort of ultimate tryst with nobody in particular; in short all the rich tints of a London fog surrounding a lamp-post without a lamp. I am very far from lacking in respect for all this groping idealism; I only say, that by its own confession, it is very incomplete compared with that of anybody who has a complete philosophy, because he has a creed. And I mean no offence when I say that anybody who has this sort of education is literally a half-educated person.

But there is another aspect of the case, which illustrates the real truth in the rather rustic Puritanism of the people who made a fuss about Darwinism in Dayton. To some of us it seems strange that such very antiquated Protestantism should be supposed to represent religion. It seems stranger that such very antiquated Darwinism should be supposed to represent science. But as a matter of fact the protest and prosecution on that occasion did represent something. It stood for a strong popular instinct, not without justification, that science is being made to mean more than science ever really says. An evolutionary education is something very different from an education about evolution. Just as a religious school openly and avowedly gives a religious atmosphere, as a scientific class does sometimes covertly or unconsciously give a materialistic atmosphere. A secularist teacher has just as much difficulty as a priest would have, in not giving his own answer to the questions that are most worth answering. He also is a little annoyed at not being allowed to put the first things first. He tends more and more to turn his science into a philosophy. It makes the matter too disputable and provocative perhaps to call that philosophy materialistic. It is more polite and equally pointed to call it monistic. But the point is that this philosophy has in it something altogether alien, not only to all religions that refer back to the will of God, but even to all moralities that revolve upon the will of man. Rightly or wrongly, its image of the universe is not that of a post put up with the design of having a lamp on it; it is rather that of a post that grew like a tree; a lamp-post that eventually grew its own lamp. Now considering this vision of vague growth simply as an atmosphere and an impression on the minds of the young, (apart from its truth or falsehood) there is no doubt that it tends so far as it goes to the notion of most things being much of a muchness, being all equally inevitable fruits of the same tree; and certainly not towards the idea of moral choice and conflict; of a contrast between black and white or a battle between light and darkness.

I am not writing controversially or trying to pin anybody with this as an individual necessity. I am writing educationally and considering the probable psychological impression of certain atmospheres and fine shades. I say that a great deal of evolution in education would not make that education very insistent on the ideas of free will and fighting morality; of dramatic choice and challenge. Why should one fruit challenge another fruit on the same tree; or how can there be a black and white choice between its slow gradations of green? So that even if we ignore the primary question of religion in the sense of the purpose of creation, there is the same sort of problem about religion even if we use it in the sense of the purpose of doing good. If a man believes that there is between vice and virtue a chasm like that of life and death, he will want to say so. And if other people only say that everything is a growth of evolution, he will not admit that they have said what he wishes to say. It is not merely a question of secular education that seems indifferent to religion, but of scientific education that seems rather indifferent to ethics. I am talking about educational effects, as educationists do; and decline any sort of sentimental recrimination about the pure and noble aims of men of science. Many who would despise anything so classical as the teaching of rhetoric, are always ready with any amount of rhetoric in praise of the teaching of science. I am not attacking the teaching of science, still less the teachers of science; I am saying the teaching of evolution, if it becomes an atmosphere, cannot be an atmosphere favourable to moral fire or a fighting spirit. To put it shortly, the teaching of evolution is hardly the training for revolution.

It is hardly likely to give a special strength to the feeling that some things are intrinsically intolerable or other things imperatively just. When a reformer can only say to a slavedriver, "You are evolving too slow; you ought to have emerged from the slave-state," the slave-driver has only to answer, "You are evolving too fast; you ought to wait for the twenty-first century." Such an argument will hardly set in a flame the fanaticism of Harper's Ferry. It seems to me, therefore, that the poor Puritans of Tennessee are not altogether wrong, as a matter of educational psychology, if they say that evolutionary education, even if it is not an attack on Christian doctrine, may become an atmosphere very alien to Christian morals; or indeed any manly and combative sort of morals. After the doctrine that existence is a thing of design, the next most interesting doctrine is that life is a thing of choice; and even if men were all taught to be atheists, I doubt whether mere evolutionism would have taught them to be really spirited and warlike atheists. And to see atheists lose their one great virtue of ferocity would indeed be a serious loss to religion.

The Philosophy of Islands

From The Venture Annual, 1903

Suppose that in some convulsion of the planets there fell upon this earth from Mars, a creature of a shape totally unfamiliar, a creature about whose actual structure we were of necessity so dark that we could not tell which was creature and which was clothes. We could see that it had, say, six red tufts on its head, but we should not know whether they were a highly respectable head-covering or simply a head. We should see that the tail ended in three yellow stars, but it would be difficult for us to know whether this was part of a ritual or simply a tail. Well, man has been from the beginning of time this unknown monster. People have always differed about what part of him belonged to himself, and what part was merely an accident. People have said successively that it was natural to him to do everything and anything that was diverse and mutually contradictory; that it was natural to him to worship God, and natural to him to be an atheist; natural to him to drink water, and natural to him to drink wine; natural to him to be equal, natural to be unequal; natural to obey kings, natural to kill them. The divergence is quite sufficient to justify us in asking if there are not many things that are really natural, which really appear early and strong in every normal human being, which are not embodied in any of his after affairs. Whether there are not morbidities which are as fresh and recurrent as the flowers of spring. Whether there are not superstitions whose darkness is as wholesome as the darkness that falls nightly on all living things. Whether we have not treated things essential as portents; whether we have not seen the sun as a meteor, a star of ill-luck.

It would at least appear that we tend to become separated from what is really natural, by the fact that we always talk about those people who are really natural as if they were goblins. There are three classes of people, for instance, who are in a greater or less degree elemental: children, poor people, and to some extent, and in a darker and more terrible manner, women. The reason why men have from the beginning of literature talked about women as if they were more or less mad, is simply because women are natural, and men, with their formalities and social theories, are very artificial. It is the same with children; children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes. So again, the poor man is simply a person who expends upon treating himself and his friends in public houses about the same proportion of his income as richer people spend on dinners or cabs; that is, a great deal more than he ought. But nothing can be done until people give up talking about these people as if they were too eccentric for us to understand, when, as a matter of fact, if there is any eccentricity involved, we are too eccentric to understand them. A poor man, as it is weirdly ordained, is definable as a man who has not got much money; to hear philanthropists talk about him one would think he was a kangaroo. A child is a human being who has not grown up; to hear educationists talk one would think he was some variety of a deep-sea fish. The case of the sexes is at once more obvious and more difficult. The stoic philosophy and the early church discussed woman as if she were an institution, and in many cases decided to abolish her. The modern feminine output of literature discusses man as if he were an institution, and decides to abolish him. It can only timidly be suggested that neither man nor woman is an institution, but things that are really quite natural and all over the place.

If we take children, for instance, as examples of the uncorrupted human animal, we see that the very things which appear in them in a manner primary and prominent, are the very things that philosophers have taught us to regard as sophisticated and over-civilized. The things which really come first are the things which we are accustomed to think come last. The instinct for a pompous intricate and recurring ceremonial, for instance, comes to a child like an organic hunger; he asks for a formality as he might ask for a drink of water.

Those who think, for instance, that the thing called superstition is something heavily artificial, are very numerous; that is those who think that it has only been the power of priests or of some very deliberate system that has built up boundaries, that has called one course of action lawful and another unlawful, that has called one piece of ground sacred and another profane. Nothing it would seem, except a large and powerful conspiracy could account for men so strangely distinguishing between one field and another, between one city and another, between one nation and another. To all those who think in this way there is only one answer to be given. It is to approach each of them and whisper in his ear: "Did you or did you not as a child try to step on every alternate paving-stone? Was that artificial and a superstition? Did priests come in the dead of night and mark out by secret signs the stones on which you are allowed to tread? Were children threatened with the oubliette or the fire of Smithfield if they failed to step on the right stone? Has the Church issued a bill `Quisquam non pavemente'?" No! On this point on which we were really free, we invented our servitude. We chose to say that between the first and the third paving-stone there was an abyss of the eternal darkness into which we must not fall. We were walking along a steady and safe and modern road, and it was more pleasant to us to say that we were leaping desperately from peak to peak. Under mean and oppressive systems it was no doubt our instinct to free ourselves. But this truth written on the paving-stones is of even greater emphasis, that under liberal systems it was our instinct to limit ourselves. We limited ourselves so gladly that we limited ourselves at random, as if limitation were one of the adventures of boyhood.

People sometimes talk as if everything in the religious history of man had been done by officials. In all probability things like the Dionysian cult or the worship of the Virgin were almost entirely forced by the people on the priesthood. And if children had been

sufficiently powerful in the State, there is no reason why this paving-stone religion should not have been accepted also. There is no reason why the streets up which we walk should not be emblazoned so as to commemorate the memory of a superstition as healthy as health itself.

For what is the idea in human nature which lies at the back of this almost automatic ceremonialism? Why is it that a child who would be furious if told by his nurse not to walk off the kerbstone, invents a whole desperate system of footholds and chasms in a plane in which his nurse can see little but a commodious level? It is because man has

always had the instinct that to isolate a thing was to identify it. The flag only becomes a flag when it is unique; the nation only becomes a nation when it is surrounded; the hero only becomes a hero when he has before him and behind him men who are not heroes; the paving-stone only becomes a paving stone when it has before it and behind it things that are not paving stones.

There are two other obvious instances, of course, of the same instinct; the perennial poetry of islands, and the perennial poetry of ships. A ship like the Argo or the Fram is valued by the mind because it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it, floating loose on the desolate elements, the resources, and rules and trades, and treasuries of a nation, because it has ranks, and shops and streets, and the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar. An island like Ithaca or England is valued by the mind because it is a ship, because it can find itself alone and self-dependent in a waste of water, because its orchards and forests can be numbered like bales of merchandise, because its corn can be counted like gold, because the starriest and dreariest snows upon its most forsaken peaks are silver flags flown from familiar masts, because its dimmest and most inhuman mines of coal or lead below the roots of things are definite chattels stored awkwardly in the lowest locker of the hold.

In truth, nothing has so much spoilt the right artistic attitude as the continual use of such words as 'infinite' and 'immeasurable'. They were used rightly enough in religion, because religion, by its very nature, consists of paradoxes. Religion speaks of an identity which is

infinite, just as it spoke of an identity that was at once one and three, just as it might possibly and rightly speak of an identity that was at once black and white.

The old mystics spoke of an existence without end or a happiness without end, with a deliberate defiance, as they might have spoken of a bird without wings or a sea without water. And in this they were right philosophically, far more right than the world would now admit because all things grow more paradoxical as we approach the central truth. But for all human imaginative or artistic purposes nothing worse could be said of a work of beauty than that it is infinite; for to be infinite is to be shapeless, and to be shapeless is to be something more than mis-shapen. No man really wishes a thing which he believes to be divine to be in this earthly sense infinite. No one would really like a song to last for ever, or a religious service to last for ever, or even a glass of good ale to last for ever. And this is surely the reason that men have pursued towards the idea of holiness, the course that they have pursued; that they have marked it out in particular spaces, limited it to particular days, worshipped an ivory statue, worshipped a lump of stone. They have desired to give to it the chivalry and dignity of definition, they have desired to save it from the degradation of infinity. This is the real weakness of all imperial or conquering ideals in nationality. No one can love his country with the particular affection which is appropriate to the relation, if he thinks it is a thing in its nature indeterminate, something which is growing in the night, something which lacks the tense excitement of a boundary. No Roman citizen could feel the same when once it became possible for a rich Parthian or a rich Carthaginian to become a Roman citizen by waving his hand. No man wishes the thing he loves to grow, for he does not wish it to alter. No man would be pleased if he came home in the evening from work and found his wife eight feet high.

The dangers upon the side of this transcendental insularity are no doubt considerable. There lies in it primarily the great danger of the thing called idolatry, the worship of the object apart from or against the idea it represents. But he must surely have had a singular

experience who thinks that this insular or idolatrous fault is the particular fault of one age. We are likely to suffer primary painful resemblance to the men of Thermopylae, the Zealots, who raged round the fall of Jerusalem. If we are rushing upon any destruction it is not, at least, upon this.