LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 RELIGIO POET^E 
 
 ETC.
 
 RELIGIO POE7JE 
 
 ETC. 
 
 BY 
 
 COVENTRY! PATMORE 
 
 NEW EDITION
 
 PREFACE 
 
 " SOME of these Essays have already appeared 
 in the Fortnightly Review or elsewhere." 
 
 In the original issue the author had noted 
 that "thoughts had sometimes been repeated, 
 almost in the same words." In the rearrange- 
 ment here adopted no attempt has been made 
 to obviate this repetition, which may be even 
 more conspicuous than in the original order; 
 but, "as these thoughts are mostly unfamiliar 
 and significant, readers will be none the worse 
 for encountering them twice or even thrice." 
 
 Shortly before his death, Mr. Patmore had 
 suggested a rearrangement for a new issue,
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 which has been adopted and completed for this 
 edition. A few corrections and omissions have 
 also been made, the greater number of which 
 were either marked or sanctioned by the author 
 himself. The alterations not actually his own 
 are few and of small importance. 
 
 Some obvious mistakes in matters of fact, 
 and some errors of punctuation, have been 
 corrected; here and there a word has been trans- 
 posed where the original order was imperfect; 
 and one or two passages which seemed to have 
 been written for an immediate purpose rather 
 than for more permanent effect have been 
 omitted.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAY PAGE 
 
 I. RELIGIO POETM i 
 
 II. THE PRECURSOR 10 
 
 III. THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION . . 18 
 
 IV. ATTENTION 31 
 
 V. CHRISTIANITY AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 38 
 
 VI. "A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE" 46 
 
 VII. THE Bow SET IN THE CLOUD . . 51 
 
 VIII. CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" . . 57 
 
 IX. SIMPLICITY 64 
 
 X. ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS OF PURITY 68 
 
 XI. CONSCIENCE 73 
 
 XII. REAL APPREHENSION . . -77 
 
 XIII. SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS . . 85 
 
 XIV. POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES . . 96 
 
 XV. IMAGINATION 102
 
 via RELIGIO POETVE, ETC. 
 
 BSSAY PAGE 
 
 XVI. THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS . . 108 
 XVII. A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK . . "3 
 XVIII. THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, OPINION, 
 
 AND INEQUALITY . . . .121 
 
 XIX. LOVE AND POETRY . . . .139 
 
 XX. THE WEAKER VESSEL .... 147 
 
 XXI. DIEU ET MA DAME .... 159
 
 I 
 
 RELIGIO POET.E 
 
 No one, probably, has ever found his life per- 
 manently affected by any truth whereof he has 
 been unable to obtain a real apprehension^ which, 
 as I have elsewhere shown, is quite -a different 
 thing from real comprehension. Intellectual assent 
 to truths of faith, founded on what the reason 
 regards as sufficient authority for, at least, experi- 
 mental assent, must, of course, precede real 
 apprehension of them, as also must action, in a 
 sort experimental, on faith of truths so assented 
 to ; but such faith and action have little effective 
 life, and are likely soon to cease, or to become 
 mere formalities, unless they produce some degree 
 of vital knowledge or perception. I do not see 
 what is to become of popular Religion, parodied 
 and discredited as Christianity is by the " Reli- 
 gions" of Atheists, Moralists, Formalists, Philan- 
 B
 
 2 RELIGIO 
 
 thropists, Scientists, and Sentimentalists, unless 
 there can be infused into it some increased long- 
 ing and capacity for real apprehension. 
 
 Coleridge, at one time, proposed to write a 
 " Religio Poetae," with the view, I suppose, of 
 correcting the imperceptive character of modern 
 faith. The Poet is, par excellence, the perceiver, 
 nothing having any interest for him, unless he 
 can, as it were, see and touch it with the spiritual 
 senses, with which he is pre-eminently endowed. 
 The Saints, indeed, seem, for the most part, to 
 have had these senses greatly developed by their 
 holiness and their habitual suppression of the 
 corporeal senses. But, as a rule, they do not 
 speak, perhaps from the fear of being too implicitly 
 believed ; or, if they do, they are careful 
 
 " To make Truth look as near a lie 
 As can comport with her divinity," 
 
 in order to adapt it to the public capacity. But 
 the Poet has this advantage, that none, save the 
 few whose ears are opened to the teaching which 
 would be ridiculed or profaned to their own de- 
 struction by the many, will think that he is in 
 earnest, or that his flights into regions of percep- 
 tion, in which they can perceive nothing, are other 
 than flights of fancy. He occupies a quite 
 peculiar position somewhere between that of a
 
 RELIGIO POET^: . 3 
 
 Saint and that of Balaam's Ass. His intellect 
 seems capable of a sort of independent sanctifica- 
 tion, while his moral constitution usually enables 
 him to prophesy without a Prophet's responsi- 
 bilities. The Saint dreads lest he should receive 
 praise of men for the holiness through which he 
 has acquired his knowledge ; the Poet understands 
 very well that no one will or ought to think the 
 better of his righteousness for his being a seer. 
 
 The Poet, again, is not more singular for the 
 delicacy of his spiritual insight, which enables him 
 to see celestial beauty and substantial reality 
 where all is blank to most others, than for the 
 surprising range and alertness of vision, whereby 
 he detects, in external nature, those likenesses and 
 echoes by which spiritual realities can alone be 
 rendered credible and more or less apparent, or 
 subject to " real apprehension," in persons of 
 inferior perceptive powers. Such likenesses, 
 when chosen by the imagination, not the fancy, 
 of the true Poet, are real words the only real 
 words ; for " that which is unseen is known by 
 that which is seen," and natural similitudes often 
 contain and are truly the visible ultimate* of the 
 unseen. " God," says Goethe, " is manifested in 
 ultimates," a doctrine destined to produce some 
 amazing developments of Christianity, which is 
 yet in its infancy, though it seems, as it has
 
 4 RELIGIO 
 
 always seemed to contemporaries, to be in its 
 decay. The Poet, again, has, like Newton, a 
 special calculus a. doctrine of infinite series, 
 whereby he attains to unveil the infinite and 
 express it in credible terms of the finite, showing 
 it, if not as actually apprehensible, yet as possibly, 
 and even certainly so, to orders of intellect which 
 are probably only a continuation and development 
 of our own. Of this calculus Dante has abund- 
 antly made use, and those passages in his Poems 
 which we read with the most passionate delight 
 and real apprehension are precisely those in which 
 the argument rises from natural experience to the 
 dizziest heights of spiritual probability. For 
 neither in this, nor in any other Poet of like rank, 
 is there any solution of _ continuity between the 
 lowest and the highest, any more than there is in 
 the progress of the seed from its first germination 
 through its various transformations in seed-leaf, 
 stem, flower, and fruit. It is still nature, but more 
 mature nature nature developed by successive and 
 intelligible degrees of growth and glory, the first 
 of these degrees being, even in this life, quite 
 familiar to those who know the truth of Words- 
 worth's saying 
 
 " By grace divine, 
 Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine." 
 
 Again, the Poet always treats spiritual realities
 
 RELIGIO POET^E 5 
 
 as the concrete and very credible things they 
 truly are. He has no slipshod notions about the 
 immeasurable .and " infinite." He knows, as 
 Plato knew, that God Himself is most falsely 
 described as infinite. God is the synthesis, as 
 Proclus declares in his treatise on the Fables of 
 Homer, of "Infinite" and "Boundary," and is 
 excellently intelligible, though for ever unutter- 
 able, by those who love Him. 
 
 Another vast advantage in the Poet's mode of 
 teaching is that it is, even in its indignant denials 
 of negation, necessarily and always, as far as he 
 is a Poet, affirmative and positive. " Let your 
 communication be, Yea, Yea, and Nay, Nay, for 
 whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil." 
 He gives the world to eat only of the Tree of Life, 
 reality ; and will not so much as touch the Tree 
 of Knowledge, as the writer of Genesis ironically 
 calls the Tree of Learning that leads to denial of 
 knowledge. He is the very reverse of a "scientist." 
 He is all vision and no thought, whereas the other 
 is all thought and no vision. But " Where there 
 is no vision the People perish"; and of thought 
 without vision it may be truly said, " Dust shalt 
 thou eat all the days of thy life," and " dust thou 
 art and to dust shalt thou return." The Poet 
 could not do other than he does. All realities will 
 sing, but nothing else will. Judge then how much
 
 6 RELIGIO POET.E 
 
 reality there is, in the modern teaching of religion, 
 by the songs of its prophets ! Where in these 
 songs is the flavour of reality, " the sweetness of 
 the lips that increaseth learning " ? 
 
 There is a kind of perception in a state of solu- 
 tion which must not be overlooked or depreciated. 
 It is the substance of most of the finest lyric poetry, 
 and of the religion of nearly all religious people, 
 especially in these days. But this fire-mist is a 
 very inferior form of perceptive knowledge. There 
 is none of it in Dante. It is the " Infinite " with- 
 out the " Bound," and is not sufficiently concrete 
 to be very serviceable or communicable, being 
 mainly unintelligent heat, though that heat may 
 be holy. For effective teaching there must be the 
 disc of really apprehended dogma ; rays diversely 
 reflected and refracted from clouded sources will 
 not do. The soul dares not believe its own mar- 
 vellous guesses and instincts, unless it can fall back 
 upon definite dogma for confirmation and justifica- 
 tion, nor can the corollaries of dogma, which are 
 often of far more personal weight than dogma 
 itself, be inferred without a definite premise. 
 
 I suppose I need not say that by Poets I do 
 not, in this argument, mean only or chiefly those 
 who have written in verse. During most of the 
 centuries which have elapsed since the beginning 
 of Christianity the highest imaginative as well as
 
 RELIGIO POET^: 7 
 
 intellectual powers of mankind have been wholly 
 absorbed by theology and theological psychology ; 
 and I may say, without fear of contradiction from 
 those who are at all well read in the works of St. 
 Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. 
 Francis of Sales, St. John of the Cross, and a 
 score of others like them, that the amount of 
 substantial poetry, of imaginative insight into the 
 noblest and loveliest reality to be found in their 
 writings, is ten times greater than is to be found 
 in all the poets of the past two thousand years put 
 together. The vastness of the mass hinders our 
 appreciation of its substance and altitude. Aquinas 
 is to Dante as the Tableland of Thibet is to the 
 Peak of Teneriffe ; and the first is not less essen- 
 tially a poet, in the sense of a Seer, because his 
 language is even more austere and without orna- 
 ment, than that of the latter. It is true that the 
 outward form of poetry is an inestimable aid to 
 the convincing and persuasive power of poetical 
 realities ; but there is a poetic region the most 
 poetical of all which is incapable of taking the 
 form of poetry. Its realities take away the breath 
 which would, if it could, go forth in song ; and 
 there is such a boundless wilderness of equally 
 inspiring subject to choose from that choice be- 
 comes impossible, and the tongue of love and joy 
 is paralysed.
 
 8 RELIGIO POETVE 
 
 To conclude, I think that it must be manifest 
 to fitly qualified observers, that religion, which to 
 timid onlookers appears to be on a fair way to total 
 extinction, is actually, both by tendency from within 
 and compulsion from without through heresies 
 and denials of all that cannot be " realised " in 
 the initial stage of a new development, of which 
 the note will be real apprehension, whereby Chris- 
 tianity will acquire such a power of appeal to the 
 " pure among the Gentiles," i.e. our natural feel- 
 ings and instincts, as will cause it to appear almost 
 like a New Dispensation, though it will truly be no 
 more than the fulfilment of the express promises of 
 Christ and His Apostles to the world, promises 
 which in every age have been fulfilled to thousands 
 and thousands of individuals who have so learned 
 " the King's secret " as to have become the con- 
 verts of intelligible joy. Or would it be too vast 
 a hope that such a development may truly assume 
 the proportions and character of a New Dispensa- 
 tion, the Dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the 
 Spirit of Life and perceived Reality, continuing 
 and fulfilling the Dispensation of Christ, as His 
 did that of the Father the " Persona," or aspect 
 of the Holy Trinity in the worship of the Israel- 
 ites ? a Dispensation under which millions instead 
 of thousands should awake to those facts of life of 
 which Christ said, " I have many things to say to
 
 RELIGIO POET.E 9 
 
 you, but you cannot bear them yet ; but when the 
 Holy Spirit shall come, He shall teach you the 
 things I have told you." Under the first dispensa- 
 tion men were the servants of God ; under the 
 second, His sons : " Sons now we are of God, 
 but what we shall be hath not yet appeared." 
 What if, under a third, " the voice of the Bride 
 and the Bridegroom shall be heard again in our 
 streets " ? Our Lord, by an intervention which 
 He declared to be premature, converted water into 
 the wine of the Marriage Feast. He did so for 
 hundreds, before the time of His manifestation in 
 the flesh ; He has done so for thousands who 
 " have lived to see His coming " since. What if 
 His fuller coming to the whole Church should be 
 a like revelation, even in this life, for every one 
 who so " seeks first the kingdom of God and His 
 righteousness," that " all these things shall be 
 added to him " ?
 
 II 
 
 THE PRECURSOR 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE, in answer to some one who 
 objected that there were several interpretations of 
 a passage in Scripture besides that which the 
 Saint had offered, replied : " The more interpreta- 
 tions the better." The words of Scripture and of 
 the ancient mythologies and profoundest Poets 
 may, indeed, be credited with containing and in- 
 tending all the truths which they can be made to 
 carry, and I do not mean to controvert any other 
 account of the significance of the peculiar, mys- 
 terious, and, in the letter, unaccountable place 
 held by St. John the Baptist in relation to the 
 gospel of Divine Love, when I point out that 
 the relation of Natural Love to Divine Love is 
 represented by him with a consistent aptness and 
 an amount of detail which can scarcely have been 
 accidental. 
 
 In the first place he is represented not as
 
 THE PRECURSOR II 
 
 simply a Prophet, but as the ''Precursor" of Christ, 
 as Natural Love is the Precursor of the Divine. 
 " The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual." 
 St. Bernard says : " The love of God has its first 
 root in the most secret of the human affections." 
 The love between God and the soul is constantly 
 declared to be, in its highest perfection, the love 
 that subsists between Bridegroom and Bride (" thy 
 Maker is thy Husband," etc., etc.), and our only 
 means of understanding and attaining to these 
 supernatural relations are the meditation and 
 contemplation of their types in nature. "The 
 unseen is known by that which is seen." " No 
 greater than He was born of woman," i. e. nature ; 
 but " the least in the Kingdom of Heaven," /.<?. 
 Divine Love, " is greater than he " ; and, as the 
 latter increases, he must decrease. His baptism 
 was necessary even to Christ as the representative 
 of Christians, for none can receive effectually 
 Christ's baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit with- 
 out the previous baptism of the purifying water of 
 natural love, water itself always signifying, in the 
 parabolic vocabulary of all primitive religions, the 
 life of the external senses, or nature. Food of 
 locusts, -wild honey, and clothing of camel's hair are 
 also interpreted, by those who are most learned 
 in that mystical vocabulary which everybody 
 acknowledges to have been largely in use by the
 
 12 THE PRECURSOR 
 
 writers of the Scriptures as well as by those of all 
 the great mythologies, and without which a great 
 part of Scripture is hopelessly unintelligible, as 
 significant of life in natural good, of which the 
 highest is natural love. " Honey," writes one of 
 the most deeply learned in this vocabulary, 
 " signifies natural good." " Locusts," says the 
 same writer, "signify nutriment in the extreme 
 natural," and camel's hair and a leathern girdle 
 "denote what is natural," skin and hair being 
 those things which are most external. St. John 
 the Baptist is spoken of by the Church as the 
 "strong man "and the "standard-bearer," being 
 the mightiest of human powers and their leader. 
 He alone of all natural men is " sanctified from 
 his mother's womb " and originally holy : " sole 
 mortal thing of worth immortal." He " came to 
 bear testimony to the light " of that Love which 
 is the fulfilment of the prophecy of natural love. 
 Herod, the world, was friendly to him, who never- 
 theless rebuked the Tetrarch for his violation of 
 a law of natural love, and the Saint was sacrificed 
 by him to an impure passion and the allurements 
 of a dancing girl ; which is the usual fate of pure 
 natural love, "sanctified from the womb," when 
 brought into conflict with the sensuality which 
 apes and profanes it. " Let the Church," says 
 the Service of the Saint's Day, "rejoice in the
 
 THE PRECURSOR 13 
 
 nativity of blessed John the Baptist, by whom she 
 came to the knowledge of the Author of her re- 
 generation." " Behold," says the same Service, 
 " I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles" 
 i.e. the interpreter of the faculties and desires 
 of the natural man. In virtue of his peculiar 
 mission the Baptist compares and measures him- 
 self with Christ as no other ever did : " He must 
 increase, I must decrease " ; "He cometh, the 
 latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to un- 
 loose ;" I am not the Christ, that most holy love, 
 for whom ye, who have not yet seen Him, take 
 me, but only the one pure mortal voice " crying 
 in the desert " of the world, and prophesying of 
 Him ; " I ought to be baptized by Thee, and 
 comest Thou to me ?" " He was not the true 
 light, but was to give testimony of the light." 
 " After me there cometh a man who is preferred 
 before me," etc. 
 
 Jesus, being baptized by John, the heavens 
 were opened to him, and a voice from heaven 
 said : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am 
 well pleased ;" i.e. by the baptism of natural love, 
 the heavens are sensibly opened to him who is 
 already the Son of God, and Christ, as the repre- 
 sentative of Christians, is declared then most 
 pleasing to the Father when He has donned and 
 assumed to Himself the naturallife of love. Con-
 
 14 THE PRECURSOR 
 
 earning the Baptist, our Lord afterwards says : 
 " What went ye out to see ? A prophet ? Yea, I 
 tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is 
 he of whom it is written, Behold I send my Angel 
 before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before 
 thee," "and if you will receive it, he is Elias 
 that is to come. He that hath ears, let him hear." 
 Our Lord says of John : " If I bear witness of 
 myself, my witness is not true " (that is, the 
 Divine Love cannot effectually witness directly of 
 itself), " there is another " (natural love) " that 
 beareth witness of me. He was a burning and a 
 shining light, and you were willing for a time to 
 rejoice in him." John is "the friend of the Bride- 
 groom, who standeth and heareth Him, and 
 rejoiceth with joy because of the Bridegroom's 
 voice. This my joy is therefore fulfilled." John, 
 though naturally nearer to Jesus than any other 
 man " born of woman " (nature) " knew him not " 
 but by the coming of the Holy Spirit, i.e. divine 
 inspiration. So natural love, though so pure an 
 image of the divine, knows not the divine until 
 this is supernaturally revealed to it. 
 
 What seems to be thus obscurely shown forth 
 as a parable in the life of the Precursor is, how- 
 ever, plainly affirmed by other parts of Scripture 
 and by the doctrine of the Church concerning the 
 significance of natural love. It is distinctly de-
 
 THE PRECURSOR 15 
 
 clared to be a " great Sacrament," or fact having 
 a symbolic value of the highest consequence, as 
 representative of the final and essentially nuptial 
 relationship of Christ and the Church, of which 
 every member is a church in little, with Our Lord 
 for her head, as man is the head of woman, and 
 God the Head of Christ. It is remarkable that, 
 in a time when general reverence for religion is 
 greatly diminishing, a true but altogether unen- 
 lightened reverence for the holy mystery of natural 
 love should be sensibly increasing among us ; and 
 we may, perhaps, hail this circumstance as the pre- 
 cursor of a new development of Christianity which 
 shall exert a hitherto unknown power over men, 
 as being based upon and explanatory of their 
 universal instincts and longings, which the sym- 
 bol is, by as universal consent, wholly incapable 
 of satisfying. And, besides the interest of the 
 feelings, the intellect of man, which is now bent 
 upon examining everything, must find, in the other- 
 wise inexplicable phenomena of natural love, a 
 satisfaction in the prospect of finding its key in 
 another mystery which is, at least, much less in- 
 scrutable and does not involve any of the anom- 
 alies and absurdities of that passion, when it is 
 regarded as an end having no further end. Every 
 one who has loved and reflected on love for an 
 instant, knows very well that what is vulgarly re-
 
 16 THE PRECURSOR 
 
 garded as the end of that passion, is, as the 
 Church steadfastly maintains, no more than its 
 accident. The flower is not for the seed, but the 
 seed for the flower. And yet what is that flower, 
 if it be not the rising bud of another flower, flashed 
 for a moment of eternal moment before our eyes, 
 and at once withdrawn, lest we should misunder- 
 stand the prophecy, and take it for our final good ? 
 If it be other than a symbol, that is, as Coleridge 
 defines a symbol to be, a part taken to represent 
 the whole, then love, which the heart of every lover 
 knows to be the supreme sanity, must be con- 
 demned by the intellect as the supreme insanity ; 
 and its " extravagances," which, from the Church's 
 point of view, are in the highest representative 
 order, must be looked upon as those of a maniac 
 who takes a green "goose for a goddess and him- 
 self for a god. But all this becomes clear when 
 the parties to love are regarded as priest and 
 priestess to one another of the divine womanhood 
 and the divine manhood which are inherent in 
 original Deity. They are but ministers to each 
 other of the "great sacrament" of that glory 
 "which the Son had with the Father before the 
 beginning of the world " ; and the co-existence of 
 the greatest defects, short of an absolute defect of 
 manhood and womanhood, with a claim to the 
 .greatest reverence and devotion, has its exact
 
 THE PRECURSOR if 
 
 analogue in the nature and claims of priesthood, 
 as being the vehicle and only the vehicle of the 
 Divine in sacramental administrations. 
 
 I should far exceed the space to which I have 
 desired to limit myself were I to exhaust the say- 
 ings of the Scripture and the services of the Church 
 which bear upon this interpretation of the Pre- 
 cursorship of John. Let me, however, point out 
 that the great painters of the Renaissance, from 
 Botticelli and earlier downwards men who show, 
 to those who have eyes to see, the most ardent 
 interest in the hidden meanings of scriptural say- 
 ings and events, seem to have discerned and in- 
 tended to convey the substance of what I have 
 now said, by their frequent associations of the two 
 Johns, John the Baptist and John " the Divine" 
 as companions and co-worshippers of the Child 
 Jesus, their synthesis, "God made Man of the 
 Woman," to whose maternal bosom he eternally 
 clings.
 
 THE realities discerned by faith are susceptible of 
 infinite corroboration, for "God is infinitely visible 
 and infinitely credible," and, since the knowledge 
 of God is the one end of life, the sum of human 
 wisdom consists in the accumulation of such cor- 
 roborations. Now any fresh and original testi- 
 mony is thus corroborative. It is the nature of 
 man to believe the more because another believes, 
 and to derive additional knowledge from another's 
 mode of knowing. But how shall such testimony 
 be conveyed, without betraying knowledge which 
 often cannot be attempted to be spoken without 
 profanation by and peril to the ignorant, except in 
 enigmas which are clear to those who know, but 
 hopelessly dark to those who do not ? Accord- 
 ingly we find that the teaching of every great 
 religion, the Jewish and Christian perhaps above 
 all, when it once leaves the preparatory stage of
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 19 
 
 natural religion and morals and formal dogma, 
 becomes mainly enigmatical and mythical. It is 
 quite right that popular teaching should be limited, 
 as it is, to the preparatory stage and to the en- 
 forcement of it by Divine sanction, threats, and 
 general promises ; for the house of God must be 
 built, the soul must know the direction in which 
 to look for light, and must be formed gradually 
 into sincere desire of and constant endeavour for 
 perfection, before God can inhabit it, and baptize 
 it with that fire without which the baptism of 
 water lies dormant as a grain of wheat in an 
 Egyptian tomb. It is at this point that real 
 religion, which is self-evident ', begins, and at this 
 point occurs that great change in the mode of the 
 soul's progress which is well known to Catholic 
 psychologists. Up to this point the progression 
 is from truth to good ; afterwards from good to 
 truth, its rule then becoming " prove all things ; 
 hold fast " (not " that which is true," but) " that 
 which is good " ; the substance becomes the guide 
 to the form, whereas, before, the form was the 
 guide to the substance ; and at this point the 
 Church begins to teach the soul, chiefly by en- 
 igmas, how she may best understand the in- 
 structions and reciprocate the complacencies of 
 that Divine Lover of whom she is henceforward 
 the intimate companion and the living abode.
 
 20 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 The fact of the existence of these enigmas lies 
 patent to the dullest. The vision of Ezechiel 
 (which no one was permitted to read before he 
 was thirty years of age), Seir and Paran, in 
 which God was, but the people knew it not ; the 
 myth given in the Breviary on the day of the 
 " apparition of St. Michael " ; the great serpent, 
 Leviathan ; the King of Egypt become King of 
 Israel ; the almost identical myth of Proteus, the 
 sea-beast, also called " Cetes, King of Egypt : ' ; 
 the birth of Aphrodite ; the mystery of Perse- 
 phone, whose true name it was not lawful to utter, 
 concerning which ^schylus says : " Happy is he 
 who comprehends it, for over him Hades shall 
 have no power " ; and a thousand other such 
 things are manifest " riddles," and were manifestly 
 meant for such. Moreover, they are, for the 
 most part, such elaborate riddles that the key 
 which unlocks any one of them, the thought which 
 fills up all the manifold vacuities of external sense, 
 must be the key and the thought. 
 
 Of most such enigmas Proclus says, in his treatise 
 on the Fables of Homer, that they are unfit for 
 the reading of youth, to whom they are absurd, 
 or scandalous, or worse ; but that they are the 
 proper food of age when purged by discipline 
 from obscuring and uncontrolled passions, the 
 co -existence of which with the knowledge of
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 21 
 
 Divine secrets would involve that conjunction of 
 perceived good with its denial by actual evil, 
 which is more irremediably fatal to the soul than 
 any amount of unmixed impurity. The senseless 
 and often repulsive external word of these enigmas 
 is as the black " veil of Moab," which God hangs 
 before the sanctuaries of His brightest glory ; 
 and as the foul expirations of the serpent of Cos, 
 which repelled all but him who was pure and 
 bold enough in faith to kiss the death-breathing 
 lips, and so convert them into those of a goddess, 
 exhaling celestial perfumes. 
 
 Her whole system of language and rites proves 
 either that the Church, who can speak her mind 
 plainly enough when there is occasion for plain- 
 ness, wantonly and habitually indulges in the folly 
 of delivering a large part of her message in a 
 language that few can understand, or that there 
 is a body of knowledge which ought not to be 
 and cannot be effectually communicated to all ; 
 and that, in her reticence, she is but obeying the 
 command : " Tell not the vision to any man till 
 Christ be risen " in him. 
 
 It would, no doubt, be of great use to many if the 
 meaning of a few of the principal of the symbolic 
 words common to all great religions were made a 
 part of religious instruction ; though it is wonderful 
 how, by a sort of instinct, some of these keys are
 
 22 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 discerned and read by the simplest and least 
 instructed of those who, among their low sur- 
 roundings and labours, lead pure and meditative 
 lives. I have heard some of our "savages," 
 haunters of " Little Bethels," " Sions," and " Car- 
 mels," use the obscurest imagery of Scripture 
 with an evident grasp of significance which many 
 a Bishop might have envied. Such acquaintance 
 with the vocabulary of symbols would not unveil 
 anything which ought to remain veiled, while 
 the ordinary reader and unenlightened enthusiast 
 would be saved by it from the absurdities and 
 scruples and often pernicious extravagances into 
 which he now falls through his literal adoption of 
 words which to sensible persons are manifestly 
 parabolic ; and the student of deeper capacity 
 would be provided with the clues without which 
 he cannot read even "the letter of the enigmas of 
 life. 
 
 To readers of the early Christian writers, the 
 interpretation of many of these words must be 
 familiar. The names of the four chief points of 
 the compass, water, fire, cloud, thunder, lightning, 
 nation, generation, father, mother, son, daughter, 
 rich, poor, tree, stone, fish, mountains, birds, rod, 
 flower, leaf, etc., etc., have fixed significances 
 without the knowledge of which thousands of 
 passages of Scripture, even those not involving
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 23 
 
 any enigmatic meaning, cannot be understood. 
 What, without such knowledge, can be made of 
 passages, among innumerable others, like this : 
 "The coming of the Son of Man is as the lightning 
 which shineth from the east unto the west ; for 
 where the body is there shall the eagles be 
 gathered together " ? Or how, without such means 
 of interpretation, can some of the direct injunctions 
 of Our Lord, even in what is vulgarly supposed 
 to be the plain speaking of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, be obeyed ? Of some of these injunctions, 
 St. Augustine, rejecting the literal sense, says, in 
 one of his sermons : " You may do these things 
 if you can, but I cannot." From what torments 
 might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be 
 saved by remembering that Our Lord " spake not 
 without a parable " ! 
 
 This mode of expressing realities by things 
 having some resemblance to them, carried to the 
 highest and fully conventionalised in the Egyptian 
 hieroglyphic writing, was, no doubt, the origin of 
 the similar language of Scripture, the early Church, 
 and the mythologists, and must have been readily 
 intelligible by the learned and those mysta to whom 
 their learning was gradually imparted. A still 
 earlier mode of what may be called real speech 
 may be found in those first roots of language 
 which William Barnes and other philologists have
 
 24 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 shown to constitute a system of phonetic imagery 
 of sounds having a subtle correspondence to 
 things. And the language of the poetry the 
 only real speech of all nations and times, has 
 largely consisted of a mixture of phonetic and 
 objective imagery. 
 
 There is, besides, the more spacious imagery 
 of parable proper, of which the external word is 
 a consistent story, fictive or actually historic. Of 
 this kind it may be well to point out that the 
 Church, in her services, authorises the belief that 
 many of the simplest incidents, even in the New 
 Testament, have parabolic meanings of far higher 
 value than the historic, which meanings we are 
 sometimes called upon, in the prayers that, in the 
 Breviary, etc., follow the recitals, to beg that "we 
 may be made worthy to understand." Indeed, 
 nothing can account for the emphasis and repeti- 
 tion with which some, extremely trivial, incidents 
 are related in the New Testament, without attri- 
 buting to the writers either the extreme of silliness 
 and irrelevance, or a wisdom of which few of us 
 are worthy to lift the veil.- 
 
 Let it be remarked that symbolic and more or 
 less enigmatic language and rites have a high 
 value, even when they are not intended to conceal 
 truth from those to whom its expression would be 
 premature. They compel, in the recipient of their
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 25 
 
 teaching, a state of active co-operation, a volun- 
 tary excitement of the mind, greatly more favour- 
 able to the abiding effect of moral truths and 
 impressions than is the state of merely passive 
 attention. This mode of reception includes the 
 act of reflection, without which no knowledge 
 ever becomes our own. And here let it be said 
 that, so far are the originators and doctors of the 
 great religions of the world and its greatest poets 
 from having adopted an unnatural method of 
 teaching, that it is the very method of Nature, 
 whose book, from beginning to end, is nothing 
 but a series of symbols, enigmas, parables, and 
 rites, only to be interpreted by the "discerning 
 intellect of man " actively and laboriously em- 
 ployed. 
 
 The rites, customs, architecture, ornaments, and 
 vestures of the Church are stores of more or less 
 enigmatic teaching, and not one can be destroyed 
 or altered without risk of some unknown loss. 
 What have we not lost, what loss have we not to 
 fear in the future, from the vandalism of " good 
 taste." How " natural," for example, it would 
 be that King Humbert, if ever he thinks fit to 
 assume possession of St. Peter's and the Vatican, 
 should regard the erection of an Egyptian obelisk 
 in the forecourt of a Renaissance church as a 
 monstrous solecism in art, and so abolish one of
 
 26 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 the boldest and most impressive symbols ever 
 devised to teach man that the " Lion of the Tribe 
 of Judah" (with this title the obelisk is inscribed) 
 "came out of Egypt," that the "great Serpent 
 Pharaoh, King of Egypt " (or Nature) " is become 
 Christ" by his assumption of the body which, 
 without Him, is Egypt. 
 
 The Breviary, the Missal, the " Little Office," 
 and other service books of the Church, are in- 
 exhaustible storehouses of such teaching, their 
 leading method being the immediate apposition 
 of passages from Scripture and the Fathers and 
 prayers and ejaculations which, at first sight, have 
 no related meaning, but in which the existence of 
 a common meaning, which is the true one, is 
 suggested, and may be discovered by those who 
 have the key. 
 
 Besides the forms and offices of general use in 
 the Church, there are, and have been, local rites, 
 which it may have been, and may still be, expedi- 
 ent to suppress in favour of a wider unifonnity ; 
 but of these there ought to be kept the most 
 careful record. The dance before the altar, which 
 still, I believe, is performed during Mass in some 
 churches of Spain ; the presentation, in other 
 " local rites," to the officiating priest of the bread 
 by a maiden and of the wine by a youth ; and the 
 like " customs " are all acted words of more or
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 27 
 
 less significance, and are sometimes more inter- 
 pretative of the Church's doctrine than any written 
 speech. 
 
 Of course, the enlightened students of the 
 magazines will laugh at the notion that there is 
 any knowledge which can or ought, for their own 
 sakes, to be concealed from them. I must con- 
 tent myself with the perhaps irrelevant remark 
 that those who have hitherto been reputed the 
 wisest have, in all ages, used and recommended 
 such reticence, and would have understood and 
 commended Aristotle when, in reply to Alexander's 
 complaint that, in a certain book, the philosopher 
 had published " secrets," he said : " They are 
 published and not published, for none will learn 
 from my book anything but that which he already 
 knows." And I will add that neither in ancient 
 nor in modern times has there been a poet, worthy 
 of that sacred name, who would not have been 
 horrified had he fancied that the full meaning of 
 some of his sayings could be discerned by more 
 than ten in ten thousand of his readers. 
 
 The denial by Mr. Grote and his followers that 
 there is any parabolic or enigmatic meaning in the 
 ancient mythologies is a most astounding proof of 
 how men, of common sense in most things, will 
 persistently deny, in the face of what ought to be 
 absolutely convincing evidence to the contrary,
 
 28 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 that there may be anything to be understood in 
 that which they cannot understand. It must be 
 conceded, of course, that the teaching, if teaching 
 be intended, in the Greek myths, is most unsys- 
 tematic, and that the successive additions and 
 modifications of the Homeric mythology, intro- 
 duced by the Hesiodic and Orphic schools, brought 
 in much confusion of names and attributes ; but 
 what is this against the presumption of a generally 
 intelligent character in a mass of stories which, 
 if it does not consist mainly of riddles, is as 
 amazing, in its alternative character of incongruous 
 nonsense, as the most enthusiastic neo-Platonist 
 would have it to be in the character of a store- 
 house of psychological observation, a Summa 
 Theologies of the great religion of which Scire 
 teipsum was the first injunction, as it is, indeed, 
 of Christianity. That Lord Bacon, and many 
 others before and after him, should have given, 
 as Taylor the Platonist says, "frigid and trifling 
 interpretations " of the Greek myths, is surely no 
 excuse to Mr. Grote and others for maintaining 
 that a riddle, which is on the very face of it a 
 riddle, has no answer. 
 
 On the other hand, what rational mind can see 
 anything irrational in the belief that, to a race 
 ardently believing in the Divine and in the 
 capacity of man for Divine communications, every
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 29 
 
 god and goddess represented a particular aspect 
 of divinity towards the soul ; and the soul, in 
 each of its moods, activities, and capacities, some 
 goddess or mistress of the gods ; and that the 
 adventures of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and 
 heroes should often be parables of the pheno- 
 mena of interior experience, experience too pure 
 and subtle for common acquisition, and too sacred 
 to be exposed to vulgar curiosity ? And who are 
 the best authorities upon the question, whether 
 such significance was intended or not ? Shall we 
 follow Mr. Grote and the modern " scientists," 
 with their " congenital incapacity " for spiritual 
 realities, or ^Eschylus and a hundred others before 
 him, who averred that these stories were life-giving 
 mysteries, and the law-givers of their time who 
 decreed the punishment of death against those 
 who should explain them to the multitude ? 
 
 The charge so often brought against the Church 
 of having drawn upon these sources of illustration 
 ought to constitute one of her highest claims to 
 the admiration of a " liberal " age ; for it amounts 
 to this, that she alone has dared to recognise 
 truth as canonical, wheresoever it may be dis- 
 covered, and that she has not hesitated to 
 appropriate the gold and silver vessels of her 
 enemies, when they, of all others, were found 
 fittest to contain the corresponding goods of
 
 30 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 
 
 spiritual perception and truths deducible from 
 her faith. Nay, was not the Vine itself " brought 
 out of Egypt," which, " when it had taken root, 
 filled the land " of her former captives, and vivified 
 with the inebriation of natural and intelligible 
 hope the faith that would otherwise have been 
 too spiritual for man ? The Church does not 
 dwell so often and emphatically on the coming of 
 Christ "out of Egypt" for no reason. The 
 designers of the first Cathedral of Christendom 
 were not guilty of a ridiculous solecism when 
 they placed an Egyptian obelisk at its entrance, 
 or of utter vacuity of meaning when they inscribed 
 it with the title, "The Lion of the Tribe of 
 Judah."
 
 IV 
 ATTENTION 
 
 ATTENTION to realities, rather than the fear of 
 God, is " the beginning of wisdom " ; but it seems 
 to be the last effort of which the minds, even of 
 cultivated people, are at present capable. No 
 good and excellent thing requiring the least act of 
 sustained attention to reality has any chance of 
 recognition among us ; original insight is dead, 
 and men can see only the things which others, in 
 less hasty times, have seen before them, and even 
 these they can scarcely be said to see with their 
 own eyes. Were the Divine Comedy to appear 
 for the first time now, it would never be heard of, 
 except in the small-type notices of the literary 
 papers in which the young man who criticises 
 poetry because he has not learned to do anything 
 else would hasten to avail himself of so rare an 
 opportunity of being funny. The faculty of atten- 
 tion to a line of scientific reasoning is common
 
 32 ATTENTION 
 
 enough. It is the capacity for looking steadily at 
 realities worthy of being reasoned about which is 
 wanting. Through this impotence of attention, 
 psychology has come to be a science the first axiom 
 of which is that there is no soul, a denial which 
 seems commonly to be owing, not so much to the 
 vicious interest of corrupt passions, as to physical 
 impatience of the attitude of attention demanded 
 for the contemplation of human realities. Even 
 the meats and wines of the epicure's table cannot 
 be enjoyed without the habit of attention ; hence 
 the epicure's table is no more. Wealthy givers of 
 dinners now trust, with scarcely any danger of dis- 
 credit, to their guests' swallowing with applause 
 whatever dainties are set before them, provided 
 the consequent headache or colic is not immedi- 
 ately referable to its cause. 
 
 Much less will the nectar and ambrosia of the 
 natural affections, for example, yield their flavours 
 to the palate " studious to eat and not to taste." 
 Through want of attention, more often, perhaps, 
 than through inveterate vice, how many tread into 
 the mud, with the foolish hoof of their lusts, the 
 very flowers after which they are for ever in frantic 
 search ; and almost all men now bewail the im- 
 possibility of attaining the poor dolls which they 
 dignify by the name of their " ideals," when 
 Nature, " if we do but open and intend the eye,"
 
 ATTENTION 33 
 
 is always actually excelling every imagination of 
 beauty ; and realities, far lovelier than any 
 " ideal," stand about us, willing to be wooed and 
 longing to be won. 
 
 At least once in a lifetime, and by some hitherto 
 unexplained awakening of full attention for a little 
 while, what man but has seen a woman, and what 
 woman a man, before whom all their previous 
 " ideals " have paled ; and if, by subsequent near- 
 ness, they get within the eyes' focus and the vision 
 is dimmed, that is the fault of the eyes, and no 
 discredit to the reality of the thing seen, as is 
 proved by the way in which death restores the 
 focus, and with it the vision. Attention, however, 
 as multitudes have confessed with fruitless tears, 
 would have adapted the focus of the eye to the 
 nearness of the object, and made it more, not less, 
 lovely by closer inspection. 
 
 Through inattention to their own true desires 
 and capacities, men walk, as in a dream, among 
 the trees of the Hesperides, hung with fruit the 
 least savour of which includes the summed sweet- 
 ness of all the flesh-pots of Egypt, yet so far 
 surpasses it as, once tasted, to supersede for ever 
 the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the 
 pride of life ; but they do not dream of plucking 
 them. The letter of Scripture is like the walls of 
 a furnace, unsightly, and made of clay, but, to 
 D
 
 34 ATTENTION 
 
 those who attend, full of chinks and crevices 
 through which glows the white heat of a life 
 whose mysteries of felicity it is " unlawful to 
 utter " ; but religious people are in too great a 
 hurry of spirit to see anything but the clay walls, 
 and they lead mean and miserable existences 
 while loudly professing the faith which " hath the 
 promise of this life also." 
 
 The hour or half-hour of daily " meditation," or 
 attention to his own business, which used to be 
 the practice of every good man, is now unheard of 
 unless it be in Monasteries. The best among us, 
 wholly unconscious that men can advance the 
 world's improvement only by attending to their 
 own, are busy about everything but that which 
 concerns themselves, and after their dusty and 
 profitless day's work they go, as Coleridge says, 
 to the Divine Muses for a-musement. Hence, 
 among many other unprecedented phenomena of 
 our day, there is an almost complete lack of men 
 of letters. We have only newspaper, magazine, 
 and booksellers' hacks ; clever enough, indeed, 
 but without insight, character, or any care for, 
 or desire to propagate, a knowledge of the true 
 realities and delights of life. 
 
 Yet how vast are the rewards of a habit of atten- 
 tion, and how joyful an answer can the few who 
 still practise it give to Wordsworth's question :
 
 ATTENTION 35 
 
 " Paradise and groves 
 
 Elysian, Fortunate Fields like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic main why should they be 
 A history only of departed things, 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
 For the discerning intellect of man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 In love and holy passion, shall find these 
 A simple produce of the common day." 
 
 The habit, however, of such attention to realities 
 as I am speaking of, is not to be formed without 
 pain in those who have it not, unless they are 
 possessed of mind and conscience, and something 
 of the spirit of the child, that 
 
 " Mighty Prophet, Seer blest, 
 
 On whom those truths do rest, 
 Which we are toiling all our lives to find." 
 
 The soul which wants these qualifications, and has 
 long dwelt easily and pleasantly and, perhaps, 
 without external offence in unrealities, finds itself, 
 when it endeavours to face reality, filled with an 
 anguish of impatience, and rushes to and fro in 
 the prison of its customs like a caged wild beast. 
 There are thousands, however, who are not 
 altogether so disqualified ; and these, if they 
 only looked, would " see in part and know in 
 part" those eternal entities which, if not so seen 
 and known now, will never be seen and known.
 
 36 ATTENTION 
 
 " Blessed," cries the Substantial Wisdom, " is he 
 who explains me " ; adding, in words of piercing 
 but disregarded sweetness of invitation : " Delicice 
 mecz esse cum filiis hominum" With her, as with 
 a mortal mistress, the one unpardonable crime is 
 want of " attention." 
 
 It is not to be supposed, however, that the 
 celestial secrets with which she rewards her stead- 
 fast votaries are to be attained, even by such as 
 are naturally not disqualified, without considerable 
 sacrifice of meaner goods. In the eyes of fools 
 there is no such foolishness as the knowledge of 
 things of which they know and can know nothing ; 
 and from such he who attends faithfully to his 
 own true business will probably have much to 
 suffer ; for they will not be content with despising 
 him for his infatuations, but they will hate him 
 and do him what harm they can. He will also 
 have to sequester himself from many natural and 
 innocent interests and pleasures, in order to have 
 time for the great learning, which is usually of 
 slow acquisition, and the result of patient listening 
 and of the hardly acquired habit of suspending 
 active thought, which is the greatest of all enemies 
 to attention; for " good thoughts are the free 
 children of God, and do not come by thinking." 
 He will also have to suffer from ordinarily good 
 and well-intentioned people the charge of narrow-
 
 ATTENTION 37 
 
 ness of benevolence as well as of intellect ; for he 
 will have no time or energy to spare for seeking 
 oilt and serving other objects of charity, seeing 
 that the knowledge of his own supreme needs 
 will be increased by every day's addition to his 
 immense but incommunicable treasure ; incom- 
 municable, indeed, now, but, as he learns from the 
 Church, an addition to the everlasting treasure of 
 all who are united with him in the " Body of 
 Christ." Not that he will really be inoperative in 
 the time being for good to others ; for the mere 
 life, however retired, of one in habitual communion 
 with Wisdom, breathes forth a sphere of wisdom 
 which extends far beyond its definable bounds ; 
 and, as for the "narrowness" with which he is 
 charged, he may answer that the power of cleaving 
 is in proportion to the narrowness of the edge and 
 the weight at its back ; and that the least of his 
 words or actions may be of more effect in the 
 world than the life's labour of any of the herd of 
 good people who are " busied about much serving," 
 instead of sitting attentive at the feet of Truth.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AN EXPERIMENTAL 
 SCIENCE 
 
 CHRISTIANITY is an experimental science, and the 
 best answer to one who questions, If it be true, is, 
 Try it. But one difference between this and other 
 experimental sciences is, that the necessary course 
 of experiment is almost always, in the beginning 
 at least, extremely difficult, painful, and repugnant 
 to nature. Another is, that the result, though, 
 provided this course be conducted with full sin- 
 cerity and patience, sure to be absolutely convinc- 
 ing to the experimentalist, will not be wholly 
 communicable or convincing to anybody else. It 
 will give, indeed, to the person who has attained 
 it, certain characteristics of manner, speech, and 
 action which will strongly tend to impress any 
 honest man that the experiment may be worth 
 trying on his own behalf; but that is all. 
 
 The experiments and conclusions of the natural
 
 AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 39 
 
 sciences can be discerned and judged by the 
 natural senses, which all men have in common, 
 and which have no interest in being blind to the 
 facts of nature. But the spiritual senses, except 
 in the exceedingly rare cases of some men of 
 genius, in whom they appear to exist independently 
 of the moral perfection which is their commonly 
 indispensable condition, have scarcely any life in 
 the great mass of men, who live, often virtuously, 
 or at least decorously, contented with knowing 
 and enjoying only in their natural shadows those 
 realities which are devoutly and substantially 
 discerned by that higher order of perception which 
 is usually the ultimate reward of so " doing God's 
 commandments " that we may " know of the 
 doctrine." 
 
 The multitude, Catholic and otherwise, who 
 are, as Sir Thomas Browne says, " incapable of 
 perfectness," have branded this science with the 
 name of " mysticism." Cardinal Wiseman, accept- 
 ing the name, defines " mysticism " as being " the 
 science of love." What wonder if experimental 
 knowledge in this science should be scarcely at 
 all accessible to the vast majority of souls, in 
 whom the seed of love has never yet passed be- 
 yond its rudimentary and apparently opposite 
 state of fear, and who really regard the very 
 notion of personal love to God and delight in
 
 40 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 communion with Him as a sort of irreverence, 
 which, in them, indeed, it would be ! There is, 
 in fact, no Church but one which, as a rule, 
 ventures even to propose this kind of love as the 
 end and crown of its teaching. St. Evremond 
 says that the most characteristic difference be- 
 tween that Church and all others is that, while 
 the one makes it the ambition of the soul to 
 please Him, the others seek only to avoid dis- 
 pleasing Him ; love being the principle in the 
 one case, fear in the other. The " science of 
 love " is, indeed, " mysticism " to the many who 
 fancy its experiences incommunicable as the 
 odour of a violet to those who have never smelt 
 one to be those of idiosyncratical enthusiasm or 
 infatuation ; but, among " mystics " themselves, 
 the terms of this science are common property. 
 Deep calleth unto deep a prophecy which is not 
 of "private interpretation," but one which has a 
 language as clear as is that of the sciences of the 
 dust, and as strict a consensus of orthodoxy. A 
 St. Catherine of Genoa and a St. John of the 
 Cross know each what the other is saying, though, 
 to a Huxley or a Morley, it is but a hooting of 
 owls. 
 
 There are infinite degrees of this experimental 
 knowledge, from that first sensible " touch " of 
 God's love, which usually accompanies the first
 
 AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 41 
 
 sincere intention of perfection for His sake, to 
 that of the Saints who have united themselves to 
 God by a series of agonising initiations of self- 
 sacrifice, and by years of actual and habitual 
 perfection of obedience in the smallest as well as 
 the greatest things ; and, further still, to the 
 knowledge of the angels, whose purification and 
 consequent capacity goes on increasing for ever. 
 But the very first sincere experiment, and its per- 
 ceptible result, though they may be followed by 
 years and years of relapse and seeming failure, 
 are generally final. The man who has made the 
 experiment has seen God ; and that is an event 
 which he will never be able altogether to forget 
 or deny, a positive fact which, for reality and self- 
 evidence, stands alone in his experience, and which 
 no amount of negative evidence will be able, even 
 for a moment, to obscure. 
 
 For this first experiment of faith, a belief in a 
 personal God and in His right to command and 
 judge us, is the only dogmatic ground which is 
 required, and this ground almost every form of 
 religion affords ; and that " touch " of love which, 
 as the Church says, " supersedes all the sacra- 
 ments," is given to each one, who, with all his 
 heart, even for an hour, submits himself to the 
 guidance of the " Light which lighteth every man 
 who cometh into the world." If his memory
 
 42 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 clings, with however poor a fidelity, to that first kiss 
 of God, that baptism of fire which is the tacit know- 
 ledge of the Incarnation for is it not God made 
 one with his body, i.e. his senses ? that initiating 
 perception that God is will lead him into further 
 actual illumination in proportion to his fidelity and 
 to the amount of Catholic dogma which his par- 
 ticular Church may be capable of teaching for 
 fidelity does not discover dogma, but only enables 
 the faithful, in proportion to their faith, to confirm it 
 with absolute personal assurance. False dogmas 
 cannot be believed with this experimental cer- 
 tainty because they do not represent realities ; 
 therefore such dogmas will not be believed by any 
 one who has seen God, in such a way as finally to 
 hinder the saving power of the true teaching. 
 Thus, in Churches and sects which teach dogmas 
 in themselves subversive of all morality and right 
 belief in God's nature and government, we find 
 individuals so deeply rooted in the fundamental 
 orthodoxy of love, that, . while daily professing 
 with their mouths the immoral and pernicious 
 doctrines of their sect, they so deny these doctrines 
 in their hearts and lives, that the only harm a 
 very great one indeed which befalls them from 
 this position, is the impossibility of adequately 
 developing their own nature. Each great Catholic 
 dogma is the key, and the only key, to some
 
 AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 43 
 
 great mystery, or series of mysteries, in humanity ; 
 and, this dogma wanting, the humanity of the 
 individual is so far deprived of the means of 
 eternal development ; which must be initiated in 
 this life, if at all. But, in any case, provided 
 he has attained " to lay his just hand on that 
 golden key which opes the palace of eternity," by 
 absolute fidelity to his best light, the truths^ which 
 he has adopted by faith, become " res visa et 
 cognita" in a sense of which Lord Bacon did not 
 dream ; for Lord Bacon's " philosophy," as philo- 
 sophy, was even baser than his political career, 
 and it did not deal with " things," which are the 
 objects of Wisdom, but with phenomena, which are 
 only hints and corroborations of realities dis- 
 covered by that which is philosophy indeed. 
 
 A duck-pond, however, must not be expected to 
 grow salmon or pike, and the offspring of the 
 conventicle will always remain narrow in the pos- 
 sibilities of experimental knowledge as compared 
 with those who have been fed in the larger waters 
 which occasionally bring forth a Hooker or a 
 Keble, as again these are when compared with the 
 ocean-brood of Austins, Bernards, and Theresas. 
 
 But, wherever the elementary dogmas of Chris- 
 tianity are taught, there the man who is perfectly 
 sincere and faithful is in the possibility of an 
 infinitely precious experimental knowledge ; and
 
 44 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 that knowledge, however limited (and the know- 
 ledge even of the angels is limited), will fit him 
 for his destined place in the communion of Saints, 
 and may raise him far higher in God's favour than 
 other Saints who may have discerned and loved a 
 wider truth, truly, indeed, but with less intensity. 
 Such men are Christ's beloved "poor" (not the 
 world's " poor," who are quite as proud, vicious, 
 luxurious, and covetous of this world's goods as 
 the world's " rich "), and, though they have been 
 fed only with crumbs from the table of those who 
 sit at feasts of the fullest orthodoxy, such crumbs 
 will nourish in them a life which the merely " wise 
 and learned " in the letter of divine truth can 
 never know. 
 
 To such a man the Incarnation becomes, not 
 the central dogma of his faith, but the central fact 
 of his experience ; for it is going on perceptibly 
 in himself; the Trinity becomes the only and self- 
 evident explanation of mysteries which are daily 
 wrought in his own complex nature, the result of 
 ih&fiat: "Let us make man in our own image;' 
 and he finds in his soul and body the answer to 
 the prayer, " Let me so behold Thy presence in 
 righteousness, that I may wake up after Thy like- 
 ness and be satisfied with it." Like Teiresias, he 
 has seen the unveiled wisdom, and thenceforth 
 can see nothing else ; his guide is thenceforward,
 
 AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 45 
 
 not formal laws or truths which can be uttered, 
 but the golden rod of a supreme good, which 
 leads him infallibly (and most sensibly) by glow- 
 ing into greater felicity so long as he is in the right 
 path, and by fading, more or less, as he is in 
 danger of error. Like Teiresias, again, on the 
 mountain heights of contemplation persevered in 
 through years and years, he strikes, from time to 
 time, with his golden staff upon interwoven mys- 
 teries of nature, and finds in them the revelation 
 of undreamt-of secrets of his own being ; and he 
 finally becomes, not so much an adorer as an 
 actual participator in the nature and felicity of 
 that Divinity which alone " has fruition in Him- 
 self," and " who became man that men might 
 become gods."
 
 VI 
 
 "A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING 
 TONGUE " 
 
 IN things of the spirit we can only " know in part 
 and see in part" and "as in a glass darkly." 
 Hence, in writing concerning these things, the 
 aphoristic manner always has been and always 
 will be found the most proper and fructifying. 
 In spiritual philosophy the blessing of systematic 
 perfection has ever been paid for by the curse of 
 barrenness ; for between the facts of the science 
 of the soul there is often no visible continuity and 
 sometimes an appearance of contradiction ; and 
 in such cases we have to be contented with the 
 simple perception and affirmation that they are. 
 Again, such facts, in proportion to their import- 
 ance, are simple and self-evident ; and, in propor- 
 tion to their simplicity and self-evidence, they are, 
 as Aristotle says, apart from the domain of the 
 reasoning faculty, and therefore unintelligible and
 
 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 47 
 
 incredible to those who have acquired the habit 
 of relying, not upon reason, but upon reasoning, 
 for proof. Nothing can be more express than the 
 way in which this is over and over again asserted 
 and implied by Our Lord and His Apostles. 
 " None can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the 
 Holy Ghost," that is, by the spirit of direct vision. 
 " I tell you these things, not because ye know 
 them not, but because ye know them." "The 
 Holy Ghost shall teach you whatsoever I shall 
 have said unto you," etc. 
 
 Dogmatic truth is the key and the soul of man 
 is the lock ; the proof of the key is in its opening 
 of the lock ; and, if it does that, all other evidence 
 of its authenticity is superfluous, and all attempts 
 to disprove it are absurd in the eyes of a sensible 
 person. That only a very small proportion of the 
 human race should be capable of at once receiving 
 self-evident truth 'is quite natural. The key is not 
 less the key because it will not open a lock of 
 which the wards are filled with stones and rusted 
 by disuse or destroyed by sin. " Authority " 
 comes in here. When a man "speaking with 
 authority," that is, with the indescribable air and 
 character which is an unmistakable claim to 
 being listened to, affirms things beyond all 
 ordinary experience and credibility, and adds that 
 it is only by " doing the commandments " that we
 
 48 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 
 
 can " know of the doctrine," a sincere and busi- 
 nesslike mind will at least consider the experiment 
 of that moral perfection, to which such wonderful 
 things are promised, worth trying ; and, if he tries 
 with full integrity of purpose and persistence, all 
 persons who have reached that perfection assure 
 us that he will not fail to attain to that direct 
 vision to which truths, received on "authority" as 
 " dogmas," gradually become discernible as facts^ 
 " infinitely visible and credible " (as St. Augustine 
 says of God) and of incomparable personal interest 
 to himself. The infinite visibility and credibility 
 of such facts imply a counterpart of infinite 
 invisibility and incredibility. "The angels them- 
 selves desire to look into these things " and to 
 fathom them fully, but in vain. The higher they 
 soar in the light of vision the more manifestly 
 incomplete and " unsystematic " is their theology ; 
 and their knowledge becomes more and more 
 merely and absolutely " nuptial knowledge," that 
 is, the knowledge of fruition, for which there is no 
 intelligible word nor " reason." 
 
 When the soul has passed the " purgative " 
 stage of obedience to law, and has attained the 
 " unitive " condition, in which all fidelity is habitual 
 and comparatively easy, she becomes capable, for 
 the first time, of real " insight," and knowledge 
 ceases to be acceptance of " dogma " so much as
 
 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 49 
 
 personal communion. She exclaims, " The Lord 
 hath fashioned me and laid his hand upon me " ; 
 but she adds, " Such knowledge is too excellent 
 for me ; I cannot attain unto it " ; and the utter- 
 ances whereby she endeavours to draw others to 
 her wisdom are interjections, doxologies, parables, 
 and aphorisms, which have no connecting unity 
 but that of a common heat and light. 
 
 Another reason for the inadequacy of expression 
 in the science of the soul is the " unlawfulness " 
 of speech concerning some of its most essential 
 facts. St. Paul, in his vision, says he saw things 
 which it was, not impossible, but " unlawful " to 
 utter. Again, the spectators of the Transfiguration 
 were commanded not to tell the Vision to any man 
 until Christ should be risen, that is, until Christ 
 should be risen in their auditor, it being lawful 
 to speak of the mysteries revealed in that Vision 
 only to those who already know. Again, the 
 Bridegroom of the soul loves to reserve to Him- 
 self the office of her instructor in His secrets ; and 
 the more she has learned the less will she be 
 willing to speak. " My secret to me," is the 
 reply of the Saints to inquirers concerning their 
 peculiar knowledge. " Night," says the Soul, " is 
 the light of my pleasures," and she refuses by 
 speech to obscure them with the darkness of day. 
 Furthermore, her confession of such knowledge 
 E
 
 50 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 
 
 involves incurring the praise of man for having 
 corresponded with peculiar fidelity to the graces 
 of God ; and she abhors the praises of any but 
 Him, whose assurance that He " greatly desires 
 her beauty" makes all lesser laudation profane 
 and disgusting. 
 
 Besides the pride and modesty of the pure soul, 
 there is yet another reason why those who know 
 most speak least. There comes a time to those 
 who follow perfection, in which all possible forms 
 of beauty are, as it were, discerned at once ; it is 
 not beautiful things, but Beauty itself which is 
 perceived ; and in the light of this faint aurora 
 of the great and unspeakable vision, all particular 
 forms of beauty, such as quicken the tongue of 
 Art, fail to arrest interest and attention and to 
 excite the desire of communicating them to others. 
 A sculptor who could see, at one moment, all the 
 possible forms of beauty which might be wrought 
 from his block of marble would be quite unanxious 
 and unable to develop any one of them.
 
 VII 
 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 
 
 IT may be a matter of surprise to many that I, 
 professing to be an orthodox Christian, should 
 frequently use language which seems to assume 
 that some knowledge of Christian mysteries has 
 been enjoyed by individuals in all times and places; 
 that the light which lighteth every man who 
 cometh into the world shone, more or less 
 obscurely, before the days of Him who came to 
 bring light into the world ; but this is a belief and 
 a conviction which is growing more and more 
 general with the growing light which the con- 
 templations of Saints and Doctors have cast upon 
 Catholic doctrine ; and it need present no great 
 difficulty to the mind, however scrupulous to 
 keep within safe limits of faith, if it be borne in 
 remembrance that the Incarnation was an act 
 done in eternity as well as time ; that the Lamb, 
 the " I am before Abraham was," was " slain
 
 52 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 
 
 from the beginning " ; and that, if we look from 
 the point of view of eternity, we may see that 
 effects of that act, apparently retrospective, were 
 not really so ; but that the Bread and Wine, with- 
 out which " there is no life in us," may have been 
 received from the hand of an invisible Melchise- 
 dech by many who, in time, have longed to see the 
 Day of the Lord, and have done their best, by heroic 
 purity and self-humiliation, to merit the Vision, 
 and have thus attained to that love which, as St. 
 Augustine says, " supersedes all the sacraments." 
 Nor do glimpses of the heavenly vision seem 
 to have been absolutely denied to any race 
 of men. The general " darkness that compre- 
 hendeth it not " seems occasionally to have 
 been lifted among races whose night is by 
 most good people presumed to be total. The 
 religious rites of " savage " nations sometimes 
 startle those who know the meaning of the rites 
 of the Church by a strange identity of signifi- 
 cance. God's mercy is over all His works, and 
 He does not refuse to such babes and sucklings 
 some effectual hints of that knowledge which 
 is especially promised to babes and sucklings, 
 and denied to the wise and learned. Finally, 
 let me note that the anthropomorphic character, 
 which so universally marks the religion of the 
 simple and is so great a scandal to the " wise,"
 
 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 53 
 
 may be regarded as a remote confession of 
 the Incarnation, a saving instinct of the fact 
 that a God who is not a man is, for man, no 
 God. 
 
 The mystery of triple Personality in one Being, 
 the acknowledgment of which is the prime con- 
 dition of a real apprehension of God, may be 
 best approached by the human mind under the 
 analogue of difference of sex in one entity ; as 
 it was by Plato and by much earlier Greek Philo- 
 sophers, and, more or less obscurely, by the " wise 
 ancients " of India and Egypt, and, for the first 
 time, quite clearly shadowed forth by the Scriptures 
 and the Church ; Nature herself adding her 
 crowning witness, without which men are in- 
 capable of effectually grasping any spiritual truths. 
 " In the beginning " (i.e. before men had lost 
 their original knowledge of God and His Image 
 in Man) " there were," says Plato, " three sexes." 
 The saying, " God is a beautiful Youth and a 
 Divine nymph" is attributed to Orpheus. By 
 the Church the Second Person is represented as 
 the "glory" of the "Father," who is Christ's 
 " Head," as Man is the glory of his Head, Christ, 
 and Woman the glory of Man, who is her head. 
 The individual Man, the homo, is the Image of 
 God in so far as he is a substantial reflection of 
 the Love, the Truth, and the Life, which last is
 
 54 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 
 
 the " embrace " of Truth and Love, as the Holy 
 Spirit is said by the Church to be the " embrace " 
 of the First Person and the Second. And nature 
 goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity 
 in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and 
 material atom owing its being to the synthesis or 
 " embrace " of the two opposed forces of expansion 
 and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a 
 single entity but in virtue of its being thesis, 
 antithesis, and synthesis, and in humanity and 
 natural life this takes the form of sex, the mascu- 
 line, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, for- 
 gotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the 
 absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and 
 power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and 
 power of positive and negative in their " embrace." 
 Man (homo), according to the writer of Genesis, 
 originally contained the woman, and was in his 
 individual self the synthesis ; and the separation 
 into distinct bodies has been regarded by some 
 theologians as a consequence of the fall, from 
 which the regenerated will recover in that state 
 in which there is no giving or receiving in mar- 
 riage, man (homo) himself being a marriage and 
 " as the angels in heaven," a change which is 
 already foreshadowed in the " Brides of Christ " 
 by that which is their most sensible characteristic, 
 namely, a marked increase of the feminine nature,
 
 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 55 
 
 which is passive, humble, receptive, sensitive, and 
 responsive ; this increase, however, so far from 
 being at the expense of the masculine character, 
 that this latter is exalted into fuller strength, 
 invincible courage, and greater wisdom to com- 
 mand all that is below him, especially his own 
 feminine nature whose rebellions, in his natural 
 condition, are the cause of all his disasters. 
 
 " Receive thy glory " (womanhood " the glory 
 of the man ") " with joy," says St. Paul to those 
 who had newly seen the unveiled wisdom ; and, 
 in the wonderful parable of Teiresias, that change 
 or rather discovery in his own nature was the first 
 effect of the same vision, which blinded him, as 
 it does any one who has beheld it, to all other 
 objects of sight. This three-coloured Iris (the 
 " Messenger of Juno," the Divine womanhood), 
 is also the " Bow set in the cloud " of the renewed 
 nature, for a promise that it shall never again be 
 overwhelmed and destroyed by the deluge of the 
 disordered senses. 
 
 According to Christian theology, it was the 
 Second Person, the " glory " of God the Father, 
 who took on actual womanhood or "body" in the 
 body of the Blessed Virgin, and who imparts the 
 same to all who partake of the same body in the 
 Holy Sacrament ; and accordingly it is said by 
 St. Augustine, that " Christ is the Bride as well
 
 56 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 
 
 as the Bridegroom, for He is the Body " ; and St. 
 John of the Cross says that, in the last heights of 
 contemplation, man attains to contemplate Him as 
 the Bride, an attainment corresponding to the 
 second change of Teiresias after his seven years 
 of meditation on the first.
 
 VIII 
 CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" 
 
 MANY people doubt whether Christianity has done 
 much, or even anything, for the " progress " of the 
 human race as a race ; and there is more to be 
 said in defence of such doubt than most good 
 people suppose. Indeed, the expression of this 
 doubt is very widely regarded as shocking and 
 irreligious, and as condemnatory of Christianity 
 altogether. It is considered to be equivalent to 
 an assertion that Christianity has hitherto proved 
 a "failure." But some who do not consider that 
 Christianity has proved a failure, do, nevertheless, 
 hold that it is open to question whether the race, 
 as a race, has been much affected by it, and 
 whether the external and visible evil and good 
 which have come of it do not pretty nearly balance 
 one another. 
 
 As to the question of the real failure or success 
 of Christianity, that must be settled by considering
 
 58 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 
 
 the purpose of its Founder. Did He come into 
 the world, live and die for " the greatest happiness 
 of the greatest number," as that is commonly 
 understood, and as it constitutes the end of civil 
 government ? Was it His main purpose, or any 
 part of His purpose, that everybody should have 
 plenty to eat and drink, comfortable houses, and 
 not too much to do ? If so, Communism must be 
 allowed to have more to say for itself, on religious 
 grounds, than most good Christians would like to 
 admit. Did He expect or prophesy any great and 
 general amelioration of the world, material or even 
 moral, from His coming ? If not, then it cannot 
 be said that Christianity has failed because these 
 and other like things have not come of it. In 
 these days all truth is shocking ; and it is to be 
 feared that the majority of good people may feel 
 shocked by the denial, even in His own words, 
 that such ends had anything more than an acci- 
 dental part in His purpose or expectation. He 
 and His Apostles did not prophesy that the world 
 would get better and happier for His life, death, 
 and teaching ; but rather that it would become 
 intolerably worse. He foretells that the world 
 will continue to persecute such as dare to be 
 greatly good, and that it will consider that it does 
 God service in killing them. He tells us that 
 the poor will be always with us, and does not
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" 59 
 
 hint disapproval of the institution even of slavery, 
 though He counsels the slave to be content with 
 his status. His mission is most clearly declared 
 to be wholly individual and wholly unconcerned 
 with the temporal good of the individual, except 
 in so far as "faith hath the promise of this life 
 also" ; and moreover, what is yet more "shocking" 
 to modern sensibilities, He very clearly declared 
 that, though He lived and died to give all a chance, 
 the number of individuals to be actually benefited 
 by His having done so would be few ; so that it 
 was practically for these few only that He lived 
 and died. That may be very shocking ; but they 
 are His words, and not mine, and those who do 
 not like them should have a special edition of the 
 New Testament revised for their own use, from 
 which all disagreeable references to the many 
 called and few chosen, the narrow way which few 
 find, the broad road generally taken, and the end it 
 leads to, etc., etc., should be excised. It is not to 
 be denied that our Lord's doctrine must be in the 
 highest degree unpleasant to all who will consider 
 what it really is, and who have not the courage 
 either to reject it or adopt it in a whole-hearted 
 manner. 
 
 But has Christianity failed in doing that which 
 alone it professed to do ? It has not improved and 
 has not professed to improve bad or even indiffer-
 
 60 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 
 
 ently good people who form the mass of mankind, 
 but it does profess to do great things when it is 
 received in " a good and honest heart," that is, in 
 the heart according to Hamlet's estimate of 
 about one in ten thousand. The question, then, of 
 failure or success narrows itself to this : Has 
 Christianity done great things, infinitely great 
 things ; and has it all along been doing, and is it 
 now doing, such things, for the very small propor- 
 tion of mankind with which it professes to be 
 effectually concerned ? Professor Huxley says 
 frankly, No. It emasculates and vitiates human 
 character ; and he exemplifies his position by the 
 example of the Saints of the order of St. Francis. 
 It is well to have such a good, bold statement of 
 opinion. Here is no shilly-shallying, and we now 
 know that there are some persons, of strong com- 
 mon sense, who think that Christianity is a failure, 
 as having failed to carry out its professions. Few 
 persons who are in their right wits would choose 
 to seek a fencing-match with Professor Huxley. 
 They might be altogether in the right, and yet, as 
 Sir Thomas Browne says, they might come off 
 second best in the conflict. In any case, it is not 
 at present my affair. It is enough for me to point 
 out that it is conceivable that there are sciences, 
 even "experimental" sciences, in which Professor 
 Huxley has not yet qualified himself to be con-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 61 
 
 sidered as an expert. Christianity professes to 
 be such a science, a strictly experimental science, 
 only differing, in this character, from chemistry', 
 inasmuch as the experiments and their conditions 
 can, in the one case, be easily fulfilled and judged by 
 the senses which are common to all men ; whereas, 
 in the other, they are professedly to be fulfilled and 
 judged of by few. Here, again, come in those un- 
 pleasant assertions of the founders of Christianity : 
 " None can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the 
 Holy Ghost " ; " Do my commandments and ye 
 shall know of the doctrine," etc., etc. i.e. the 
 experiment is professedly to be made only with 
 great difficulty and self-denial, and its results can 
 be judged solely by a spirit or sense which is only 
 attainable, or which is, at least, only attained, 
 by a few. 
 
 The conclusion is this, then, that even if Chris- 
 tianity as I do not assert has not sensibly 
 affected "progress," or has affected it as much for 
 the worse in some directions as for the better in 
 others, and has not even done much individual 
 good in more than a very small proportion even 
 of those who call themselves Christians, it has 
 only not done what it never professed to do. But 
 has it done what it actually professed to do ? 
 That is a question of which the affirmative might 
 be difficult of absolute and generally intelligible
 
 62 CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" 
 
 -proof, but of which the negative must, I apprehend, 
 be considered absurd even by the great majority 
 of those who have never dreamed of qualifying 
 themselves to become final judges of such matters. 
 There are many passages in Scripture which 
 will readily occur to every reader as being on the 
 surface in contradiction to this limitation by our 
 Lord's own words of the primary purpose of 
 Christianity ; but those who know how orphaned 
 and widowed of truth even the best of us are, and 
 how the destitution we may discover in ourselves 
 is greater than that we can know of in any others, 
 will discern, with the earlier and deeper interpreters 
 of the words of our Lord and His Apostles, that 
 there are two ways of reading their exhortations 
 to help the poor and the declaration that to visit 
 the orphan and the widow is " pure religion and 
 undefiled " ; and they will understand that neigh- 
 bourly service, which is usually (but not always) 
 an inseparable accidental duty of Christian life, is 
 very far indeed from being of primary consequence, 
 though the rendering or not rendering of it where 
 there is no knowledge of a nobler service may 
 seriously affect the shallow heavens and the shallow 
 hells of the feebly good and the feebly wicked. 
 Let not such as these exalt themselves against the 
 great Masters of the experimental science of Life, 
 one of whom St. Theresa, if I remember rightly
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 63 
 
 declares that more good is done by one minute 
 of reciprocal contemplative communion of love 
 with God than by the founding of fifty hospitals 
 or of fifty churches. "The elect soul," says 
 another great experimentalist, St. Francis of Sales, 
 "is a beautiful and beloved lady, of whom God 
 demands not the indignity of service, but desires 
 only her society and her person."
 
 IX 
 
 SIMPLICITY 
 
 THERE are three simplicities ; that of the child, 
 " On whom those truths do rest which we are toil- 
 ing all our lives to find " ; the simplicity of genius ; 
 and the simplicity of wisdom. " The single eye, 
 which makes the body full of light " in modern 
 phrase, the synthetical faculty and habit is the 
 essential character of all simplicity, and it is never 
 separated from a certain innocence and naivete ; 
 and quiescence or perfection of conscience appear 
 to be its conditions. The paradisaical, or syn- 
 thetic, vision in the child is conditioned by the 
 innocence of ignorance and its inevitable freedom 
 from the habit of analysis ; the mind of the child 
 goes forth into particulars with a congenital dis- 
 cernment of the living unity of which the child 
 itself is, as yet, a part ; and it continues so to go 
 forth until it falls into some disorder of will or 
 understanding or both, which is separation from
 
 SIMPLICITY 65 
 
 that unity, and extinction of "the single eye." 
 Genius consists wholly in the possession of the 
 divine faculty of synthetic or unitive apprehension, 
 in maturer years, and in company with conscious- 
 ness or the power of reflection. This possession 
 is so exceedingly rare, whole nations and genera- 
 tions having existed without producing a single 
 noticeable instance of it, that it must be regarded, 
 not as the natural culmination of humanity, but as 
 a splendid and fortunate anomaly, or departure 
 from the law of the race. In some few of the 
 very few, indeed, it seems to have been in natural 
 order, the simplicity and purity of childhood hav- 
 ing been retained and developed through life, until 
 it has become the simplicity of wisdom ; but no 
 one who has made himself acquainted with the 
 lives of men of genius can fail to have observed 
 that a concomitant of their wonderful privilege has 
 usually been a certain dislocation and startling 
 disproportion in faculty and character. Simplicity 
 or naivete, as Lessing remarks, has invariably 
 more or less characterised them and their work ; 
 but, in most instances they seem, if one may say 
 so, to have had no moral right to this singular 
 grace, and even sometimes to have preserved or 
 attained it by bold denial or by mere oblivion of 
 its natural conditions an oblivion not unfre- 
 quently amounting to moral insanity. It has, in 
 F
 
 66 SIMPLICITY 
 
 such cases, been like the precious gum, or profuse 
 flush of flower, which comes of disease in the tree. 
 The three constituent parts of man, the intellect, 
 will, and perception, in such cases, do not act 
 together, as they do in healthy persons, but the 
 exorbitancy of perception seems to be the result 
 of a lethargy of intellect and will which leaves the 
 whole energy of life to go forth into perception, 
 as it does in the child through like conditions, 
 conditions which in the child, however, are the 
 right order of its being. The past century, which 
 has been so extraordinarily productive of men of 
 genius, has produced a more than usual propor- 
 tion of those in whom genius has been the con- 
 comitant of mental and moral defect and disorder. 
 The works of such men are marked by exceeding 
 inequality, deserts of dulness as in Coleridge, or 
 of mere imbecility as in Blake, occasionally and 
 suddenly blossoming as the rose, or the inter- 
 mittent flush of beauty and fictitious health in the 
 face of one dying of decline. 
 
 There is another kind of simplicity, which is 
 endowed, like the others, with the synthetic eye, 
 and which is the only kind that is of much abiding 
 value to its possessor ; namely, the simplicity of 
 wisdom. This is rarely found except in persons of 
 advanced years. The simplicity of age is the 
 blossom of which that of childhood is the bud and
 
 SIMPLICITY 67 
 
 almost always failing promise. Its great condition 
 is innocence, which has been retained through, or 
 recovered during, the struggles and temptations of 
 manhood ; and, as the innocence of knowledge is 
 far nobler than that of infantine ignorance, so its 
 reward, the unitive vision, has an immeasurably 
 wider field. Such men, at seventy, see again the 
 daisy as they saw it when they were seven ; but a 
 universe of realities, unknown in childhood, is dis- 
 cerned by them as a single flower of which each 
 particular reality is a petal ; and the life-long 
 unconscious analysis, which has been to other men 
 corruption, has only provided them with a vaster 
 prospect of the elemental integrity, and an inex- 
 haustible source of joy, which, like that of the 
 " young-eyed cherubim," is too grave for smiles.
 
 X 
 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS 
 OF PURITY 
 
 FEW persons who are not scholars have any 
 knowledge of the difference which there is be- 
 tween ancient and modern ideas of purity, and 
 few moralists have considered or admitted how very 
 largely the comparison, if fairly made, must tell 
 in favour of the ancients, who may be reckoned, 
 in this matter, to have ceased about the time of 
 the Reformation. As it was impurity which first 
 brought fig-leaves into fashion, so the wonderful 
 and altogether unprecedented addiction to that 
 fashion, during the past three hundred years, may 
 be taken as a fair measure of what puritanism has 
 done, during that period, for us, and is still doing, 
 still doing, for, within the last few years, the 
 actual fig-leaf has invaded the Vatican itself; 
 and even there we are no longer allowed to 
 contemplate " the human form divine," unpro-
 
 IDEAS OF PURITY 69 
 
 faned by reminders of the niceness of nasty 
 thinkers. 
 
 If we go back to those first ages of Christianity 
 which modern good people, who know nothing 
 about them, regard with such reverence we shall 
 find that the greatest and purest of the " Fathers 
 of the Church " were in the practice of addressing 
 their flocks with an outspokenness which is not 
 surpassed even by the ancient expounders of the 
 Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries, or, for that 
 matter, by the Bible itself. St. Augustine, for 
 example, in the City of God and elsewhere, 
 says things fit to throw decent people into convul- 
 sions ; and nowhere, in ancient Christian writings, 
 do we find ignorance regarded as even a part, 
 much less the whole, of innocence : witness the 
 words of Her, who is the model of innocence to 
 all ages, in her answer, at thirteen years of age, 
 to the message of Gabriel. 
 
 Strange to say, this modern notion of purity is 
 not limited to those Churches which owe their 
 origin to the Reformation. Their spirit has so 
 deeply infected the Mother Church that, though her 
 abstract doctrine remains the same as it was, she 
 practically enforces the negative idea as jealously as 
 it is enforced among good Protestants, or even 
 more jealously, so that the ancient idea of positive 
 purity, as a sacred fire which consumes and turns
 
 70 ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 into its own substance all that is adverse to it, is 
 now replaced by the conception that it is of the 
 nature of stored snow, which must be kept arti- 
 ficially dark and cool, lest it disappear for ever. 
 *' Why, papa, I thought that marriage was rather 
 a wicked sacrament ! " said a young lady, who had 
 been brought up at one of the best convent schools 
 in England, the other day to her father, when he 
 happened to be praising that institution. And in 
 the great English Catholic Colleges for boys, the 
 wonderful phenomenon may now be seen of two or 
 three hundred lads and young men whose minds, 
 with regard to the relations of the sexes, are exactly 
 in the same condition as those of the girls, and whose 
 only idea of marriage gathered from the shyness 
 with which the whole subject is avoided by all 
 about them is, that it is " rather a wicked sacra- 
 ment." The prolongation of the innocence of 
 ignorance into advanced youth would probably 
 be unmixed gain were it not that knowledge, being 
 left to come by accident, is almost sure to become 
 poisoned in the moment of acquisition. It is of 
 little use calling the legitimate connexion of the 
 sexes a " great sacrament," if no pains are taken 
 to identify the knowledge of that connexion with 
 the knowledge of what is meant by a sacrament, 
 this latter knowledge being the ground of the 
 immense difference between the pagan and Christian
 
 IPEAS OF PURITY 71 
 
 views of marriage, and if the essential sanctity of 
 chastity, married or unmarried, is left to be dis- 
 covered only by the obscuration of the conscience 
 in its loss. The whole sphere of the doctrines of 
 the early Church, like that of all the great mytho- 
 logies, revolved about mysteries which the modern 
 Churches, in practice, absolutely ignore, but which 
 nature, however improved by grace, absolutely 
 refuses to ignore. The result is a practical 
 Manicheism, which is as serious in its effects upon 
 morals as it is treasonous to the truth. The pro- 
 digious evils of unchastity prove sufficiently that 
 chastity is no merely negative good. Corruptio 
 optimi pessima. But where is the safeguard of 
 purity if its corruption is imagined to be the cor- 
 ruption, not of the " best," but of some shadowy 
 and negative state ? To avoid this immeasurable 
 evil there should be prudent and bold plain-speak- 
 ing on fitting occasions. 
 
 Plain-speaking does not vitiate. Even coarse- 
 ness is health compared with those suppressed forms 
 of the disease of impurity which come of our modern 
 undivine silences. 
 
 A young man or woman must be hopelessly 
 corrupt who would be injured by the freest reading 
 of the Bible, or Shakespeare. The most pure and 
 exalted love-poem that was ever written, Spenser's 
 Epithalamion on his own marriage, is also one of
 
 72 IDEAS OF PURITY 
 
 the most " nude " ; and all art-students " from 
 the life " know that it is ingenious dress far more 
 than the absence of dress that has dangerous 
 attractions. 
 
 The boldest confession of the doctrine of the 
 Incarnation, with all its corollaries, has been the 
 father of that splendid virtue which was but dimly 
 foreshown in pre-Christian ideas of purity. Where- 
 ever this doctrine has been denied or hesitatingly 
 taught, it is a fact of simple experience that chastity 
 has suffered with it. For what considerations can 
 ordinary morals or the widest suggestions of worldly 
 expediency substitute for those with which the New 
 Testament abounds ? " Bear and glorify God in 
 your bodies " ; " Shall I take the members of Christ 
 and make them the members of a harlot ? " " God 
 for the body, and the body for God," etc.
 
 XI 
 
 CONSCIENCE 
 
 THE twofold constitution of man which, the more 
 it is reflected upon, becomes the more manifest 
 and wonderful, and seems more and more to 
 approach the reality of a double personality in 
 one being the duality which the old theologians 
 and philosophers recognised in speaking of man's 
 nature as composed of a rational and of a sensi- 
 tive, or of a male and female soul is in nothing 
 more obvious to persons who really consider their 
 own business than in the phenomena of conscience. 
 In every person who has a right to be called a 
 person, as distinguished from an animal, there are 
 two distinct consciences : the rational or male 
 conscience, that commands him to act according 
 to certain fixed laws which he knows or believes to 
 be just and right ; and the sensitive or female 
 conscience, which persuades, indeed, to apparent 
 good, but which, in default of habitual subordina-
 
 74 CONSCIENCE 
 
 tion to the virile conscience, does more harm in 
 the world, although it is a sort of virtue, than is 
 done by any vice. It is full of scruples about 
 small things, and is often indifferent to great. 
 Its chief care is for things present and external. 
 To sympathise with and alleviate present and 
 physical or emotional suffering and evils often 
 simply fanciful, and to forgive things which ought 
 not to be forgiven, is the extent of its " charity " ; 
 and its character, in all but highly disciplined and 
 robust minds, is to be in almost continual conflict 
 with the rational conscience. So that the struggles 
 of a really good man are not so much against evil, 
 which, known to be such, does not attract him, as 
 against the inexpedient good which his inferior 
 conscience is perpetually recommending to him 
 with the most confusing plausibility, and which, if 
 it be not listened to, cries out against him with 
 lamentations and reproaches, often hard to dis- 
 tinguish from the voice of his own proper guide. 
 It is so especially when, as is mostly the case, this 
 female objurgator charges- him with refusing to 
 make sacrifices which are not only uncalled for, 
 but would be injurious to his own true welfare and 
 that of others, if they were made. This conflict 
 caused the Apostle to cry out, " The whole crea- 
 tion groaneth together until now, waiting for the 
 manifestation of the sons of God, to wit the re-
 
 CONSCIENCE 75 
 
 demption of the body" the "body," the "woman," 
 and the sensitive " soul " being synonyms to his 
 mind as to that of all ancient philosophers. The 
 sons of God i.e. the true and faithful however 
 perfect in will and deed, cannot be " manifested " 
 while they are thus in opposition to their sensitive 
 life, which should be their helpmate and " glory " 
 instead of their troublesome adversary and accuser. 
 In some exceedingly small proportion of good 
 people this glowing female conscience has been so 
 persistently resisted and ordered by severe and 
 undeviating obedience to " cold " and purely 
 rational dictates, that such persons are not only 
 no longer troubled by the insubordination and 
 contradictions of the sensitive nature, but they 
 find themselves often suddenly and unexpectedly 
 in more or less complete harmony and co-opera- 
 tion with her. She has submitted ; and the true 
 life, which had been hitherto arduous and full of 
 trouble, is thenceforward full of the joy as well as 
 the power of the Divine Spirit, she having become 
 his "glory," as she was before his accuser and 
 shame, and the means instead of the hinderer of 
 his "manifestation " as a "son of God." 
 
 It must be repeated, however, that the inferior 
 conscience is not a vice, but a virtue without suffi- 
 cient light ; and that it is far more likely to call 
 for unnecessary labour and sacrifice and to suggest
 
 76 CONSCIENCE 
 
 false and harassing scruples than to invite to ease 
 and self-indulgence. The false conscience, by 
 which the mass of men justify to themselves their 
 persistence in ignorance and self-seeking, or brace 
 themselves to the difficult pursuit of unjust ends 
 without regard to law, is a very different thing. 
 
 It should be remembered that even the truest 
 conscience is not an illuminating power, though 
 illumination is sure to follow obedience to it. - It 
 is a commanding voice, that bids all and compels 
 some to follow their best attainable light ; which 
 being done, there is no sin, though there may be 
 great and temporarily terrible error in such obedi- 
 ence. So much for the individual conscience. 
 Let it be added that when a whole nation comes 
 to be mainly guided by the female or sensitive 
 conscience, so far as it has any conscience at all, 
 then great disaster is not far off.
 
 XII 
 REAL APPREHENSION 
 
 " MAN," says Dr. Newman, " is not a reasoning 
 animal ; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, 
 acting animal." To see rightly is the first of 
 human qualities ; right feeling and right acting are 
 usually its consequences. There are two ways of 
 seeing : one is to comprehend, which is to see all 
 round a thing, or to embrace it ; one is to appre- 
 hend, which is to see it in part, or to take hold of 
 it. A thing may be really taken hold of which is 
 much too big for embracing. Real apprehension 
 implies reality in that which is apprehended. You 
 cannot " take hold " of that which is nothing. The 
 notional grasp which some people seen to have of 
 clouds and mares' nests is a totally different thing 
 from real apprehension ; though what this difference 
 is could scarcely be made clear to those who have 
 no experience of the latter. A man may not be 
 able to convey to another his real apprehension of
 
 78 REAL APPREHENSION 
 
 a thing ; but there will be something in his general 
 character and way of discoursing which will con- 
 vince you, if you too are a man acquainted with 
 realities, that he has truly got hold of what he 
 professes to have got hold of, and you will be wary 
 of denying what he affirms. The man of real 
 apprehensions, or the truly sensible man, has no 
 opinions. Many things may be dubious to him ; 
 but if he is compelled to act without knowledge, 
 he does so promptly, being prompt to discern 
 which of the doubtful ways before him is the least 
 questionable, on the ground of such evidence as he 
 has. As to what he sees to be true or right, he 
 does not argue with the person who differs from 
 him upon a vital point, but only avoids his com- 
 pany, or, if he be of an irascible temperament, 
 feels inclined to knock him down. Of course there 
 are some people who see things which do not exist ; 
 but this is lunacy, and beyond the scope of these 
 remarks. Real apprehension is emphatically the 
 quality which constitutes "good sense." Common 
 good sense has a real apprehension of innumerable 
 things which those who add to good sense learning 
 and reflection may comprehend ; but there is much 
 that must for ever remain matter only of real 
 apprehension to the best seers ; that is to say, 
 everything in which the infinite has a part, i.e. 
 all religion, all virtue as distinguished from tem-
 
 REAL APPREHENSION 79 
 
 porary expediency, the grounds of all true art, etc. 
 A man may have an immense acquaintance with 
 facts ; he may have all history and the whole circle 
 of the sciences on the tip of his tongue ; he may be 
 the author of a classical system of logic, or may 
 have so cunningly elaborated a false theory of 
 nature as to puzzle and infuriate the wisest of men : 
 and yet may not really apprehend any part of the 
 truth of life which is properly human knowledge. 
 At the present time it is by politics chiefly that the 
 difference between the two great classes of men is 
 made apparent. For the first time in English his- 
 tory, party limitations coincide almost exactly with 
 the limitations which separate silly from sensible 
 men. If you talk with a sincere Gladstonian 
 and, wonderful to say, there are still many such 
 you will soon find that he has no real apprehension 
 of anything. He only feebly and foolishly opines. 
 It is not to be concluded from what has been 
 said that the possession of the apprehending faculty 
 in any way supersedes the good of learning. The 
 power of really apprehending is nothing in the 
 absence of realities to be apprehended. In the 
 great field of ordinary social relationships and 
 duties the subject-matter of such apprehension is 
 largely supplied by individual experience, and the 
 exercise by most men of that faculty is in the main 
 limited to these ; so that the praise of " good
 
 8o REAL APPREHENSION 
 
 sense " has acquired a much narrower signification 
 than it ought to bear. Genius is nothing but 
 great good sense, or real apprehension, exercised 
 upon objects more or less out of common sight : 
 and the chief ingredient of even the highest and 
 most heroic sanctity is the same apprehension 
 taking hold upon spiritual truths and applying them 
 to the conduct of the interior as well as the exterior 
 life. Men with great strength of real apprehension 
 are easily capable of things which inferior charac- 
 ters regard as great self-sacrifices. To such men 
 such things are no more sacrifice than in an 
 ordinary man it would be to exchange a ton of 
 lead for a pound of gold. " Their hearts do not 
 forget the things their eyes have seen ;" and 
 persons like General Gordon or Sir Thomas More 
 would stare if you called anything they did or 
 suffered by the name of sacrifice. 
 
 You cannot read the writings of Newman, 
 Hooker, Pascal and St.. Augustine, without being 
 strongly impressed with the presumption that they 
 have a real apprehension of the things they profess 
 to believe ; and, since they do not justify in any 
 other way the theory that they are lunatics, a 
 right-minded reader is disposed to think that what 
 they have thus seen exists, and that his not 
 having seen such things does not materially 
 diminish that probability.
 
 REAL APPREHENSION Si 
 
 And here it may be well to recur to the text of 
 these remarks : " Man is not a reasoning animal ; 
 he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting 
 animal." All men properly so called but a good 
 many who walk upright on two legs cannot 
 properly be so called are seeing, feeling, and 
 acting animals ; but very few men, indeed, have as 
 ye,t attained to be contemplating animals, though 
 the act of contemplation exercised upon the highest 
 objects is, according to all great philosophers, even 
 pagan, the act for which Man is created and in which 
 his final perfection and felicity are attained. The 
 act of real apprehension, as it is exerted by ordinary 
 men, and even for the most part by men of extra- 
 ordinary vigour of intellectual vision, is momentary, 
 however permanent may be its effect upon their 
 principles and lives. Men of vigorous apprehen- 
 sion look at the heavens of truth, as it were, 
 through a powerful telescope, and see instantly as 
 realities many living lights which are quite invisible 
 to the common eye. But contemplation a faculty 
 rare in all times, but wellnigh unheard of in ours 
 is like the photographic plate which finds stars that 
 no telescope can discover, by simply setting its 
 passively expectant gaze in certain indicated direc- 
 tions so long and steadily that telescopically in- 
 visible bodies become apparent by accumulation 
 of impression. Such men are prophets and 
 G
 
 82 REAL APPREHENSION 
 
 apostles, whether canonical or not. It is by the 
 instrumentality of such men that religions are 
 established and upheld ; and the term " verifiable 
 religion " is a piece of mere nineteenth -century 
 cant, when applied to the examination of dogma 
 by such as have probably never had the remotest 
 apprehension of any spiritual reality. Certain 
 facts of history relating to religion may or may not 
 be capable of " verification " to the multitude ; 
 but the dogmas which are the substance of a 
 religion can be really apprehended assuming 
 them to be real and apprehensible only by the 
 exceedingly few to whom the highest powers of 
 contemplation, which are usually the accompani- 
 ments of equally extraordinary virtues, are ac- 
 corded. The mass of mankind must receive and 
 hold these things as they daily receive and hold a 
 thousand other things laws, customs, traditions, 
 the grounds of common moralities, etc. by faith ; 
 their real apprehension in such matters extending 
 for the most part only to the discernment of the 
 reasonableness of so receiving and holding them. 
 
 Now this faculty and habit of really apprehend- 
 ing things, even in its lower and not uncommon 
 degree, is an immeasurable advantage ; but it has 
 its drawback. Those who possess it are singularly 
 capable of committing the unpardonable sin, the 
 sin against knowledge. " Father, forgive them.
 
 REAL APPREHENSION 83 
 
 for they know not what they do" is a petition 
 which He who spoke these words could not have 
 offered for deeds or denials in clear opposition to 
 what a man knows to be true and good. " My 
 name is in him and He will not pardon." All men 
 agree in calling the spirit of truth which is the 
 spirit by which truth is really apprehended holy ; 
 and to deny this spirit in deliberate action may, 
 without any appeal to Christian doctrine, be 
 proved to be unpardonable by the way such 
 action is known to influence a man's character. A 
 single act of such denial, if it be in some great 
 and vital matter, often seems to destroy the soul. 
 History affords more than one example of a 
 statesman who has begun life with an eagle eye for 
 truth, a strong and tender love of honour, and 
 everything that makes a man among men. At 
 some crisis of temptation he chooses personal 
 ambition before some clearly apprehended duty of 
 patriotism ; and his whole nature seems thence- 
 forward changed : he drops like a scorched fly 
 from the flame 
 
 Then takes his doom, to limp and crawl, 
 Blind and despised, from fall to fall. 
 
 But the least practical denial of real apprehension 
 of the truth is, to such as have ever had a con- 
 science and have observed themselves, demon-
 
 84 REAL APPREHENSION 
 
 strably unpardonable, inasmuch as it destroys a 
 portion of the capacity of the soul. " The 
 remnant " may, indeed, " become a great nation," 
 but it will be still and for ever a remnant of what 
 it would have been, had it preserved the integrity 
 of its fidelity. 
 
 If we knew the secrets of the lives of those 
 alas ! innumerable who seem to have no real 
 apprehension of anything, none of the light which, 
 it is said, lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world, it would probably be found that they have 
 not been born without, but have forfeited, their 
 noblest human heritage by repeated practical 
 denials of the things which they have seen.
 
 XIII 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 I 
 
 THE intellect, the understanding or discursive 
 reason, and the memory, it need scarcely be said, 
 are three distinct faculties ; yet in their exercise 
 and the character they acquire for their possessors, 
 they are apt to be confused, and that not without 
 damage to the public and private interests of those 
 who make the mistake. Intellect, though it is 
 constantly spoken of as synonymous with under- 
 standing, is really an incomparably rarer quality, 
 the difference being that which subsists between 
 " genius " and " talent " ; and to ignorant persons a 
 ready and well-stored memory, which is consistent 
 with the almost total defect of either of the nobler 
 faculties, is often regarded as a combination of both. 
 The intellect is the faculty of the " seer." It 
 discerns truth as a living thing ; and, according 
 as it is in less or greater power, it discerns with a
 
 86 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 more or less far-seeing glance the relationships of 
 principles to each other, and of facts, circumstances, 
 and the realities of nature to principles, without any- 
 thing that can be properly called ratiocination. It 
 cannot be cultivated, as the understanding and 
 memory can be and need to be ; and it cannot in the 
 ordinary course of things be injured, except by one 
 means namely, dishonesty, that is, habitual denial 
 by the will, for the sake of interested or vicious 
 motives, of its own perceptions. Genius and high 
 moral not necessarily physical courage are there- 
 fore found to be constant companions. Indeed, it 
 is difficult to say how far an absolute moral courage 
 in acknowledging intuitions may not be of the very 
 nature of genius : and whether it might not be 
 described as a sort of interior sanctity which dares 
 to see and confess to itself that it sees, though its 
 vision should place it in a minority of one. Every, 
 body feels that genius is, in a sort, infallible. 
 That it is so, is indeed an "identical proposition." 
 So far as a man is not infallible in what he pro- 
 fesses to see, he is not a man of genius that is, 
 he is not a seer. It is by no figure of speech that 
 genius is called inspiration. Dr. Newman some- 
 where observes that St. Augustine and some of 
 the primitive teachers of the Church wandered at 
 will through all the mazes of theology with an 
 intuitive orthodoxy of genius.
 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 87 
 
 Although this faculty of direct vision is very 
 rare in comparison with those of ordinary ratio- 
 cination and memory, it is not nearly so rare as 
 is supposed by such as measure genius by its 
 manifestations in philosophy, science, art, or states- 
 manship. For one seer who has the accomplish- 
 ments and opportunities whereby his faculty can 
 be turned to public account, there are scores and 
 hundreds who possess and exercise for their private 
 use their extraordinary perceptive powers. To 
 whom has it not happened, at one time or other, 
 to witness the instantaneous shattering of some 
 splendid edifice of reasoning and memory by the 
 brief Socratic interrogation of some ignoramus 
 who could see ? 
 
 No mortal intellect or genius is other than very 
 partial, and, even in that partial character, im- 
 perfect. Absolute genius would be nothing more 
 nor less than the sight of all things at once in 
 their relationship and origin ; but the most im- 
 perfect genius has an infinite value not only 
 because it is actual sight of truth, but also and 
 still more because it is a peculiar mode of seeing, 
 a reflection of truth coloured but not obscured by 
 the individual character, which in each man of 
 genius is entirely unique. This unique character 
 is, in its expression, what is called " style " the 
 sure mark of genius, though the world at large is
 
 88 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 unable to distinguish " style " from manner, or even 
 from mannerism. Incomparably the highest and 
 fortunately the least uncommon form of genius is 
 wisdom in the conduct of life ; for this form involves 
 in a far greater degree than any other the constant 
 exercise of that courage which is inseparable from 
 genius. The saint is simply a person who has so 
 strong and clear a sight of the truth which concerns 
 him individually, and such courage to confess his 
 vision, that he is always ready to become a " con- 
 fessor " under any extremity of persecution. 
 
 True statesmanship is another form of wisdom 
 in the conduct of life ; and this is perhaps the 
 rarest of all forms in which genius manifests itself, 
 because it requires a combination of inferior faculties 
 and opportunities which is almost as rare as genius. 
 Poetry is the only near rival of true statesmanship 
 in this respect. The immensely wider and more 
 various range of vision which the great poet exer- 
 cises when compared with other artists, together 
 with the necessity for the combined working of 
 many lesser faculties and laboriously acquired 
 accomplishments, has always made of the poet the 
 ideal "genius" in the world's esteem. The separate 
 insights into the significance of form, colour, and 
 sound, upon which the arts of the sculptor, painter, 
 and musician are founded, must be included in the 
 vision of the poet of the first rank.
 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 89 
 
 What is called " common sense " is much more 
 nearly allied to genius, or true intellect, either 
 than talent, which is the outcome of the discursive 
 reason, or than learning, which is that of memory. 
 Compared with the sunlight by which the purer 
 intellect sees, common sense is the light of a 
 foggy day, which is good enough to see near 
 objects and to avoid mischief by. Science is 
 generally considered to be the outcome solely of 
 the observation of facts and the discursive reason ; 
 but in men like Kepler, Newton, and Faraday 
 there is no lack of " the vision and the faculty 
 divine." The discovery of gravitation by the fall 
 of an apple was pure vision ; and it is doubtful 
 whether there was ever a Smith's Prizeman who 
 had not a touch of a higher faculty than that 
 which gropes step by step from premisses to 
 conclusions. 
 
 A ghastly semblance of genius is often retained 
 by such persons as once had it, but have ruined it 
 by denying it in action and by endeavouring to 
 prostitute it to selfish or vicious interests. Their 
 judicial blindness is the reverse of that which was 
 inflicted upon Tiresias for daring to gaze upon 
 unveiled wisdom. He could no longer see the 
 world ; they can no longer see the heavens. But 
 their original genius takes the perverted form of an 
 intuitive craft in pursuing their ends which is no
 
 90 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 less amazing, and which, in statesmen especially, 
 is commonly mistaken by the people for the holy 
 faculty which has been quenched. 
 
 To be a man of talent a man must be able to 
 think ; to be a man of genius he must be able not 
 to think, and especially to abstain from the crazy 
 wool-gathering which is ordinarily regarded as 
 thought. "The harvest of a quiet eye," and the 
 learning of the ear which listens in a silence even of 
 thought, are the wealth of the pure intellect. And 
 the fainter and the more remote the whispers which 
 are heard in such silence, the more precious and 
 potential are they likely to be. It is no condemna- 
 tion of the thought of Hegel that he is reported 
 to have replied to some question as to the mean- 
 ing of a passage in his writings, that " he knew 
 what it meant when he wrote it." This thought, 
 too subtle or too simple for expression and memory, 
 might, if held down and compelled to manifest 
 itself more explicitly, have moved mankind. 
 
 Genius is a great disturber. It is always a new 
 thing, and demands of old things that they shall 
 make a place for it, which cannot be done without 
 more or less inconvenient rearrangements ; and 
 as it seems to threaten even worse trouble than 
 it is finally found to give, it is generally hated and 
 resisted on its first appearance. Moreover, to 
 the eye which is not congenial, the fresh manifesta-
 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 91 
 
 tion of genius in almost any kind has something 
 in it alarming and revolting ; and it is welcomed 
 with an " Ugh, ugh ! the horrid thing ! It's alive ! " 
 A man of genius who is also a man of sense will 
 never complain of such a reception from his 
 fellows. Their opposition is even respectable 
 from their point of view and with their faculties 
 of beholding. 
 
 II 
 
 Genius, like sanctity, is commonly more or less 
 foolish in the eyes of the world. Its riches are 
 " the riches of secret places " ; and they so much 
 exceed, in its esteem, those that are considered 
 riches by the common sense of men, that its 
 neglect of the ordinary goods of life often amounts 
 to real imprudence imprudence even from its 
 own point of view, whereby it is bound to avoid 
 hindrances to its free life and exercise. The 
 follies, however, of a Blake or a Hartley Coleridge 
 are venial when compared with those of the 
 thoughtful and prudent fool the fool in respect 
 of great things, as the other is in respect of small. 
 Who can measure the harm that may be done to 
 the world by a thoughtful and earnest fool one 
 who starts from data which he is too dull to verify, 
 and who multiplies his mistakes in proportion to
 
 92 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 the perspicuity and extent of his deductions ? The 
 man of " talent " who is merely such, is not a very 
 common phenomenon for " talent " is in great 
 part the product of culture, which " genius," or 
 the power of seeing, is not. Most persons of 
 talent still possess a share of that obscure kind of 
 genius called common sense, which keeps them 
 from taking up with false principles and following 
 them into wild conclusions. We need, however, 
 only recall some famous figures in the present 
 and past generation in order to be assured that 
 immense talent is consistent with an almost com- 
 plete deficiency of real insight. When the discur- 
 sive understanding is in great force and has at its 
 command abundant stores of external information, 
 we behold a power that may work the ruin of 
 empires amid applauding peoples, though it can 
 never build them up. The natural and exact 
 sciences are the proper fields for the exertions of 
 such a faculty. 
 
 Stupid persons fancy they derogate from the 
 supremacy of the pure intellect or genius by 
 observing that it is always associated with a vivid 
 imagination, which they regard as a faculty for 
 seeing things as they are not. Shelley made a 
 mistake in a totally different direction when he 
 declared that the imagination is the power by 
 which spiritual things are discerned ; whereas the
 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 93 
 
 truth is that intellect is the power by which such 
 things are discerned, and imagination is that by 
 which they are expressed. Sensible things alone 
 can be expressed fully and directly by sensible 
 terms. Symbols and parables, and metaphors 
 which are parables on a small scale are the only 
 means of adequately conveying, or rather hinting, 
 supersensual knowledge. " He spake not without 
 a parable." Hebrew, Greek, Indian, and Egyp- 
 tian religions all spoke in parables ; and poets 
 deal in images and parables simply because there 
 is no other vehicle for what they have to say. 
 " The things which are unseen may be known by 
 the things which are seen," that is, by way of 
 symbol and parable. Imagination, though it is 
 not, as Shelley says it is, the power of spiritual 
 insight, is its invariable concomitant ; and even 
 that dull kinsman of genius, common sense, would 
 feel sadly hampered in its endeavours to convey 
 its perceptions to the minds of others, were it 
 wholly without the faculty of speaking in parables. 
 It has often been noted that men of genius have 
 bad memories, and that persons having extraordi- 
 nary memories, like Cardinal Mezzofanti, have little 
 else. The truth is that there are two quite distinct 
 kinds of memory : the memory for external facts 
 and words, apart from their significance ; and the 
 memory for spiritual facts and principles. The
 
 94 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 
 
 man of genius, who may have no special reason 
 for cultivating the lower kind of memory, may 
 even find it rather a hindrance than a help. His 
 prayer is, " Let not my heart forget the things 
 mine eyes have seen." So long as his heart 
 retains the significance of the facts he has seen 
 and the words he has heard, he is willing to let 
 the words and the facts go, as a man casts away 
 the shells after he has eaten the oysters. The 
 " well-informed" person commonly differs from the 
 man of genius in this : that he carries about with 
 him all the shells of all the oysters he has ever 
 eaten, and that his soul has grown thin under the 
 burthen. 
 
 A commonplace about men of genius is, that 
 they usually have religious dispositions. It would 
 be strange were it otherwise, seeing that genius is 
 nothing but the power of discerning the things of 
 the spirit. The first principle of the most recent 
 form of " psychology " is, indeed, that there is no 
 soul ; but that man must have little genius who 
 would not say " Amen " to St. Bernard's epigram, 
 " He must have little spirit who thinks that a spirit 
 is nothing." 
 
 After what has just been said, it seems para- 
 doxical to be obliged to admit that the sins to 
 which men of genius are usually most subject are 
 those of sense. From pride, and its offspring
 
 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 95 
 
 envy, hatred, and malice, which play so terrible a 
 part in the affairs of most men, they are compara- 
 tively exempt. That they should often be more 
 subject than others to be misled by the ease and 
 pleasure of the senses, may be because the senses 
 of men of genius are more subtly permeated by the 
 spirit, of which they are the ultimate life, than are 
 those of the world at large, and are thereby ren- 
 dered more acute and less sordidly wicked. This 
 may be said, I hope, without in any way condon- 
 ing error. 
 
 Men of genius, who are therewithal men of 
 cultivated talents and great stores of appropriate 
 information, are the only safe legislators and 
 governors of empires ; not only because theirs 
 alone is the sufficiency of sound and far-seeing 
 wisdom, but because they are far less likely than 
 other men to be misled by personal motives and 
 weak fears. But such men, unhappily, are the 
 last to come to the front in states of ultra-popular 
 government ; and in such states they have accord- 
 ingly to suffer that last misery (as by one of the 
 greatest philosophers it has been called), the 
 misery of being governed by worse men than 
 themselves.
 
 XIV 
 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 
 
 IF we take stock of the world's actual achieve- 
 ments intellectual, moral, and artistic in the six 
 thousand years during which we know anything 
 about it, it is impossible not to be struck with the 
 extreme smallness of the sum of the acquisitions 
 and attainments of the human race as compared 
 with its desires and apparent possibilities. If 
 those desires and possibilities had in no instances 
 been fulfilled, the entire absence of attainment 
 would have been less startling than is its actual 
 paucity. It would not have been nearly so 
 wonderful if none had reached the high table- 
 lands of excellence in any department of human 
 activity as it is that those heights have been 
 reached by some and by so few. And the marvel 
 of this paucity becomes yet further increased when 
 it is considered that it is not only all that man- 
 kind has done, but in all likelihood nearly as
 
 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 97 
 
 much as it could have done had it tried ever so 
 hard. For it is a peculiarity of the very highest 
 work in every kind, that it is not the result of 
 painful labour, but that it is easier to do it than 
 not to do it, when it can be done at all. So that 
 humanity must not be allowed to cover its enor- 
 mous shortcomings with an " I could an I would." 
 How many philosophers has philosophy produced ? 
 If Aristotle be the type, where is the other speci- 
 men of the species ? How many statesmen have 
 there been whose faculties and characters, nearly 
 inspected, do not provoke the exclamation, " With 
 how little wisdom the world is governed ! " In 
 how many Christians has Christianity flowered as 
 in the souls of St. John and St. Francis ? Greek 
 architecture and Greek sculpture mean little more 
 than the Parthenon and its friezes. What survives 
 of Greek poetry will scarcely fill one bookshelf, 
 and English poetry, which forms the greater part 
 of the rest of the poetry of the human race, would 
 rest easily on three. The building of the Middle 
 Ages is nothing but the repetition of one inspira- 
 tion, which would remain transmitted to us almost 
 in its entirety were the Cathedral of Freiburg 
 the only specimen left to us. A single gallery 
 of the Vatican would provide wall -room suffi- 
 cient for all the paintings of the world that 
 are able to fill with satisfying peace the eye
 
 98 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 
 
 which has been educated by Botticelli, Luini, 
 and Raphael. An ordinary life affords abundant 
 leisure to take in all that two hundred generations 
 of mankind have so done as to fill the craving for 
 what all men feel to be alone satisfyingly human. 
 That is to say, one man in twenty millions or so 
 has been able, during some often very small 
 proportion of his life, to be and to do that which 
 all men, when they behold such being and doing, 
 feel to be their natural though utterly unattainable 
 prerogative. Thousands and thousands climb, with 
 praiseworthy struggles and integrity of purpose and 
 with shouts of " Excelsior ! ", the minor peaks of 
 life ; while two or three in a generation are seen 
 walking with easy breath about those great and 
 tranquil table-lands for which all of us, on behold- 
 ing them, feel that we were born. It is not that, 
 in a world of inequalities, some two or three in a 
 generation must naturally stand higher than all 
 the rest, as only one among many competitors can 
 be Senior Wrangler. That fuller excellence is a 
 region, and not a pinnacle ; and those who reach 
 it are all upon a great and facile equality, their 
 altitude being simply that of right and unhindered 
 human faculty. 
 
 Every individual of the human race is, in this 
 regard, an image of the race itself. Only for a 
 few hours, perhaps, of the million which is about
 
 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 99 
 
 the sum of the longest lifetime, has each one 
 easily and unaccountably found himself to be 
 living indeed. Some accident, some passing 
 occasion which has called upon him to be more 
 than himself, some glimpse of grace in nature or 
 in woman, some lucky disaster even, or some mere 
 wayward tide of existence, has caused the black 
 walls of his prison-house to vanish ; and he has 
 breathed in a realm of vision, generosity, and 
 gracious peace, " too transient for delight and too 
 divine." These prophetic moments one in a 
 million pass ; but, unless he has despised and 
 denied them, they leave him capable, more or 
 less, of understanding prophecy ; and he knows 
 that in him also there is a potentiality, realisable 
 perhaps under other than present conditions, of 
 becoming one in that great society in which such 
 states of life appear to be not momentary crises 
 but habits. The wider and the deeper his personal 
 experience of beauty and felicity, the more readily 
 will a man confess that life contains scarcely any- 
 thing for fruition but abundance for hope ; and 
 the better he is acquainted with that which has 
 been best done and said in all ages, the less he 
 will be inclined to believe that the world is mak- 
 ing any advances towards the realisation of the 
 promise which every age repeats. An enigma for 
 which science has no key is the certain fact, that
 
 too POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 
 
 if the world be not a prophecy of good things 
 which it shows no likelihood of providing, then 
 it is all nothing but a purposeless and badly 
 conceived tragedy, upon which the sooner the 
 black curtain drops the better. For if the world 
 be not such a prophecy, then the best of men 
 are of all men the most miserable ; to these is 
 given beyond others the " transitory gleam " which 
 shows the dulness of their ordinary life for the 
 lingering death it really is ; but, knowing little or 
 nothing of life as it is known to such, the stupid 
 and "the wicked have no bonds in their death," 
 and can feel only the comparatively tolerable evils 
 of external and accidental adversity. 
 
 There never was a time in which the " higher 
 life," "high art," etc., were less known than in the 
 present, when every goose is gabbling about them. 
 The proof is in the way these names are constantly 
 associated with that of "progress"; whereas pro- 
 gress, as respects the realities, is, if it exists at 
 all, most certainly a progress backwards. The 
 rejoicings of Lord Macaulay and his like over the 
 recent advances of mankind are exactly those of 
 a prosperous shopman over the increase of his 
 business ; and the hallelujahs of science are 
 mainly over the elaboration of mighty means for 
 petty ends and of theories which explain away 
 God and exhibit all that past ages have called
 
 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 101 
 
 wisdom as folly. It is too absurd ! Yet we must 
 not allow the present eclipse of the electric lights 
 of true learning by the flaring tar -barrels of 
 jubilant ignorance to discourage us in the belief 
 that there is, on the whole, no cessation of the 
 work for which the world goes on. The conscience 
 of mankind, though occasionally confused and 
 obscured, will always cry "Amen" to the great 
 word of St. Augustine, " What ought to be must 
 be " ; and the rare achievements of genius and 
 sanctity and the few and far-between glimpses of 
 the life that is indeed life, which are accorded to 
 all, will continue to be accepted as " the substance 
 of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
 
 XV 
 IMAGINATION 
 
 THERE are things which can never be more than 
 approximately defined, and which, even when so 
 defined, are to be rightly understood only in pro- 
 portion to the degrees in which they are possessed 
 by those who would attempt to comprehend them. 
 Such are, for example, " imagination " and 
 " genius " ; which, being faculties that are pos- 
 sessed in a very low degree by nearly all and in a 
 very high degree by extremely few, are matters of 
 the most general interest and the most variable 
 apprehension. That such faculties should, how- 
 ever, as far as possible, be understood is of great 
 practical importance to all persons ; inasmuch as 
 it greatly concerns all to know something of the 
 signs, sanctions, and claims of those powers by 
 which they are inevitably more or less ruled 
 externally and internally. 
 
 It is nothing against a definition of an entity
 
 IMAGINATION 103 
 
 which cannot be fully defined, to say that such 
 definition is "new." It was objected against an 
 interpretation by St. Augustine of some Old 
 Testament history or parable, that other authori- 
 ties had given other interpretations. " The more 
 interpretations the better," was the saint's reply. 
 In such cases various definitions and interpretations 
 are merely apprehensions of various sides of a 
 matter not wholly to be embraced or comprehended 
 by any single definition or interpretation. In 
 recent times genius and imagination have come to 
 be widely regarded as one and the same thing. 
 They are not so, however, though they are per- 
 haps indissolubly connected. The most peculiar 
 and characteristic mark of genius is insight into 
 subjects which are dark to ordinary vision and for 
 which ordinary language has no adequate expres- 
 sion. Imagination is rather the language of 
 genius : the power which traverses at a single 
 glance the whole external universe, and seizes 
 on the likenesses and images, and their combina- 
 tions, which are best able to embody ideas and 
 feelings otherwise inexpressible ; so that the 
 " things which are unseen are known by the things 
 which are seen." Imagination, in its higher 
 developments, is so quick and subtle a power 
 that the most delicate analysis can scarcely follow 
 its shortest flights. Coleridge said that it would
 
 104 IMAGINATION 
 
 take a whole volume to analyse the -effect of a 
 certain passage of only a few syllables in length. 
 In dealing with such a work as The Tempest 
 criticism is absolutely helpless, and its noblest 
 function is to declare its own helplessness by 
 directing attention to beauty beyond beauty which 
 defies analysis. The Tempest, like all very great 
 works of art, is the shortest and simplest, and 
 indeed the only possible expression of its "idea." 
 The idea is the product of genius proper ; the 
 expression is the work of imagination. There are 
 cases, however, in which it is hard to distinguish 
 at all between these inseparable qualities. The 
 initiation of a scientific theory seems often to have 
 been due to the action of the imagination working 
 independently of any peculiar direct insight ; the 
 analogy -discovering faculty that is, the imagi- 
 nation finding a law for a whole sphere of 
 unexplained phenomena in the likeness of such 
 phenomena to others of a different sphere of which 
 the law is known. Hence the real discoverers of 
 such theories are scarcely ever those who have 
 obtained the credit of them ; for nothing is usually 
 more abhorrent to men of extraordinary imagination 
 than " fact-grinding." Such men, after having 
 flung out their discoveries to the contempt or 
 neglect of their contemporaries, leave the future 
 proof of them to mental mechanics : religiously
 
 IMAGINATION 105 
 
 avoiding such work themselves, lest, as Goethe said 
 of himself, they should find themselves imprisoned 
 in "the charnel-house of science." Genius and 
 imagination of a very high kind are not at all 
 uncommon in children under twelve years of 
 age, especially when their education has been 
 "neglected." The writer can guarantee the fol- 
 lowing facts from personal witness : A clever 
 child of seven, who could not read, and had 
 certainly never heard of the Newtonian theory of 
 gravitation, said to his mother suddenly, "What 
 makes this ball drop when I leave hold of it ? 
 Oh, I know : the ground pulls it." Another child, 
 a year or two older, lay stretched on a gravel path, 
 staring intently on the pebbles. " They are alive," 
 he cried, in the writer's hearing ; " they are 
 always wanting to burst, but something draws 
 them in." This infantine rediscovery of the 
 doctrine of the coinherence of attraction and re- 
 pulsion in matter seems to have been an effort of 
 direct insight. The repetition of the Newtonian 
 apple revelation seems rather to have been the 
 work of the imagination, tracking likeness in 
 difference ; but to discern such likeness is, again, 
 an effort of direct insight, and justifies Aristotle's 
 saying that this power of finding similitude in 
 things diverse is a proof of the highest human 
 faculty. The poet's eye glances from heaven to
 
 106 IMAGINATION 
 
 earth, from earth to heaven ; and his faculty of 
 discerning likeness in difference enables him to 
 express the unknown in the terms of the known, so 
 as to confer upon the former a sensible credibility, 
 and to give the latter a truly sacramental dignity. 
 The soul contains world upon world of the most real 
 of realities of which it has no consciousness until 
 it is awakened to their existence by some parable 
 or metaphor, some strain of rhythm or music, some 
 combination of form or colour, some scene of 
 beauty or sublimity, which suddenly expresses the 
 inexpressible by a lower likeness. The vulgar 
 cynic, blessing when he only means to bray, 
 declares that love between the sexes is " all ima- 
 gination." What can be truer ? What baser 
 thing is there than such love, when it is not of 
 imagination all compact ? or what more nearly 
 divine, when it is ? Why ? Because the imagina- 
 tion deals with the spiritual realities to which the 
 material realities correspond, and of which they 
 are only, as it were, the ultimate and sensible 
 expressions. And here it may be noted, by the 
 way, that Nature supplies the ultimate analogue 
 of every divine mystery with some vulgar use or 
 circumstance, in order, as it would seem, to enable 
 the stupid and the gross to deny the divine without 
 actual blasphemy. 
 
 Profligacy and " fact - grinding " destroy the
 
 IMAGINATION 107 
 
 imagination by habitually dwelling in ultimate 
 expressions while denying or forgetting the primary 
 realities of which they are properly only the 
 vessels. Purity ends by finding a goddess where 
 impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which 
 of these is the reality let each man judge according 
 to his taste. " Fact -grinding" which Darwin 
 confessed and lamented had destroyed his imagi- 
 nation and caused him to " nauseate Shakespeare " 
 commonly ends in destroying the religious 
 faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of love ; 
 for neither love nor religion can survive without 
 imagination, which Shelley, in one of his prefaces, 
 identifying genius with imagination, declares to be 
 the power of discerning spiritual facts. Those who 
 have no imagination regard it as all one with 
 " fancy," which is only a playful mockery of 
 imagination, bringing together things in which 
 there is nothing but an accidental similarity in 
 externals.
 
 IN art, as in higher matters, " strait is the gate, 
 and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and 
 few there be that find it ; " and the initial cause of 
 failure in many who seem to have faculties which 
 should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty 
 of the road which leads to it as want of humility 
 in confessing its narrowness. Each man is by birth 
 a unique individuality, which the circumstances of 
 his life will increase and develop continually, if he 
 be content to do his duty in the station, intellectual 
 and otherwise, to which it has pleased God to call 
 him, without falling below its obligations or assum- 
 ing others which have not been laid upon him. 
 The low but still priceless degree of genius which 
 consists in individuality in manners, and which 
 renders the possessor of it powerfully though im- 
 perceptibly edifying in all companies, is open to all, 
 though few are sufficiently simple and honest and
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS 109 
 
 unambitious to attain to it by turning neither to 
 the right hand nor the left in pursuit of their 
 particular good of life. 
 
 " Originality," whether in manners, action, or 
 art, consists simply in a man's being upon his own 
 line ; in his advancing with a single mind towards 
 his unique apprehension of good ; and in his doing 
 so in harmony with the universal laws which secure 
 to all men the liberty of doing as he is doing, 
 without hindrance from his or any other's indi- 
 viduality. Unless " originality " thus works in 
 submission to and harmony with general law, it 
 loses its nature. In morals it becomes sin or 
 insanity, in manners and in art oddity and eccen- 
 tricity, which are in reality the extreme opposites 
 and travesties of originality. As in religion it is 
 said that " no man can know whether he is worthy 
 of love," so in art and ordinary life no man can 
 know whether he is original. If through habitual 
 fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to 
 originality, he will be the last person in the world 
 to know it. If he thinks he is original, he is 
 probably not so ; and if he is commonly praised 
 for originality, he may hardly hope to attain to 
 any such distinction. Originality never expresses 
 itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities. A 
 society of persons of true originality in manners 
 would be like an oak-tree, the leaves of which all
 
 i io THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS 
 
 look alike until they are carefully compared, when 
 it is found that they are all different. In art, the 
 sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the 
 same absence of strongly pronounced distinctions, 
 and therefore the same withdrawal from the re- 
 cognition of the vulgar, who look for originality 
 in antics, oddities, crudities, and incessant viola- 
 tions of the universal laws which true originality 
 religiously observes ; its very function consisting, 
 as it does, in upholding those laws and illus- 
 trating them and making them unprecedentedly 
 attractive by its own peculiar emphases and modu- 
 lations. 
 
 The individuality or " genius " of a man, which 
 results from fidelity in life and art to his " ruling 
 love," is almost necessarily narrow. Shakespeare 
 is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has 
 even approached to universality. His range is so 
 great that ordinary readers, if, like Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison, they had the courage to speak their 
 impressions, would with him condemn the greater 
 part of the poet's work as " rubbish " that is, as 
 having no counterpart in the " positivism " of their 
 actual or imaginative experience. Every play of 
 Shakespeare is a new vision not only a new as- 
 pect of his vision, as is the case with the different 
 works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest. 
 
 Narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS in 
 
 to greatness in art, is often its condition. Dante 
 and Wordsworth are proofs that greatness of genius 
 consists in seeing clearly rather than much ; and 
 %vell it would have been both for poets and for 
 readers had the former always or even generally 
 understood the economy of moving always on their 
 own lines. Nothing has so much injured modern 
 art as the artist's ambition to show off his "breadth" ; 
 and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost 
 because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to 
 forsake his line for the production of exceedingly 
 mortal epics or tragedies. The modern custom 
 of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at 
 a time affords proof which every one will under- 
 stand of what has been said. Who, with an eye 
 for each painter's true quality, can have gone 
 over the collections in recent years of the pictures 
 of Reynolds, Rossetti, Blake, Holman Hunt, and 
 others, without a feeling of surprise, and some 
 perhaps irrational disappointment, at the discovery 
 for the first time of the artist's limitations ? Each 
 had painted the same vision over and over again ! 
 There was no harm in that. The mistake was in 
 bringing together the replicas which should have 
 adorned "palace chambers far apart." But poets, 
 whose " works " are always collectively exhibited, 
 should beware how they betray the inevitable fact 
 of the narrowness of genius. Not only should they
 
 112 THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS 
 
 never leave their own line for another which is not 
 their own, but they should be equally careful not 
 to go over it again when they have once got to the 
 end of it.
 
 XVII 
 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 
 
 DESPOTISM, which is not government, but anarchy 
 speaking with one voice, whether it be the mandate 
 of an irresponsible emperor or that of a multitude, 
 is the " natural " death of all nationalities. They 
 may die by other means, but this is the end they 
 come to if left to themselves. When this end is 
 reached, the corrupt body may, for a time, preserve 
 a semblance of its old identity ; but it is no longer 
 a nation : it is merely a localisation of " man's 
 shameful swarm," in which the individual has no 
 help from the infinitely greater and nobler vitality 
 of which he was a living member to erect himself 
 above himself, and to breathe the generous breath, 
 and feel himself in all his acts a partaker of the 
 deceased giant's superhuman vigour. The incid- 
 ence of the misery is not only upon those compara- 
 tively few who may be conscious of its cause. The 
 malaria of the universal marsh stupefies the brain 
 I
 
 114 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 
 
 and deadens the heart of the very ploughman who 
 turns its sod, and he is hourly the worse for want 
 of the healthy breeze and invigorating prospect of 
 the ancient hills, which he himself was, perhaps, 
 among the most eager to level. Though he knew 
 it not, he was every day sensibly the better for 
 being the member of a great nation. 
 
 " He felt the giant's heat, 
 Albeit he simply called it his, 
 Flush in his common labour with delight, 
 And not a village maiden's kiss 
 But was for this 
 More sweet, 
 
 And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh, 
 And for its private self less greet, 
 The while that other so majestic self stood by." 
 
 If he does not feel the loss of his corporate life, 
 but is content to struggle, stink, and sting with the 
 rest of the swarm into which the national body has 
 been resolved by corruption, so much the worse 
 for him. His insensibility is the perfection of his 
 misery. To others, not so lost, there may be 
 hope, though not in this stage of being. None 
 who has ever lived through the final change, or 
 who, being in the foul morass of resulting 
 " equality," has been able to discern what national 
 life means, can find in private fortune wife, 
 children, friends, money any compensation for
 
 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 115 
 
 the great life of which his veins are empty. He 
 knows that there is no proximate hope, no possi- 
 bility of improvement in such a state of things. 
 He knows that it is absurd to expect anything 
 from " education " of the mass. True education 
 cannot exist under either kind of despotism. 
 National life is the beginning and end of individual 
 culture, as far as this world is concerned. The 
 acquisition of knowledge by an unorganised or 
 enslaved multitude, which must always be, in the 
 main, self-seeking and unjust, is merely the 
 acquisition of subtler and baser means for the 
 advancement of individual covetousness and the 
 indulgence of individual vices. Such education 
 is but " a jewel in a swine's snout." Fools may 
 fill the air with sentimental or hypocritical 
 " aspirations " for the good of the community ; but 
 no community exists where no excellence has the 
 power of asserting itself politically and more or 
 less in spite of the ignorance and malice of those 
 whom it would serve. Such " aspirations " are 
 but the iridescent colours on the stagnant pool ; 
 putrid splendours which have no existence in the 
 chronic and salutary storm of national life. 
 
 Nor is there any hope from without. A com- 
 paratively savage people has often been impreg- 
 nated with the germ of national being by the 
 military invasion of a civilisation still in the vigour
 
 Ii6 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 
 
 of growth ; but there is no instance of a civilisa- 
 tion which has thus lapsed into anarchy having 
 been regenerated by any such means, though its 
 stagnated life may have been perpetuated, as in 
 the case of China, by an external tyranny more 
 powerful than any of the shifting forms of des- 
 potism which it develops, if left to itself, from 
 within. Nor is there any light, even in the far 
 future, unless for him who has a fulness of that 
 cosmopolitan benevolence which is so often the 
 boast of the simpleton or the political hypocrite, 
 but, happily, so seldom the possession of the 
 natural man. He knows that no soil has ever 
 yet been found to bear two crops of national life, 
 though the corruption of one has often been 
 found, after many generations of consummated 
 decay, to be very useful dung for the nourishment 
 of other and far removed fields. But this con- 
 sideration does not bring him within measurable 
 distance of practical political consolation. 
 
 The frantic ambition of one bad man, and the 
 cowardice of half a dozen others, who would have 
 been honest had it not appeared too personally 
 inconvenient, and the apathy of that large portion 
 of the community which has been sane in judg- 
 ment but insane in sloth, have brought the final 
 evil upon us fifty or a hundred years sooner than 
 it need have come. But come it must have done
 
 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK n? 
 
 sooner or later, since the powers of evil have 
 invariably, in worldly matters, proved too strong 
 in the long run for those of good ; and such as 
 cannot bear this truth, but require that abiding 
 temporal good should come of their good works, 
 had better go into monasteries. Considering what 
 men are, the wonder is, not that all great nation- 
 alities should have come to a shameful end, but 
 that their ordinary duration of life should have 
 been a thousand years. How any of them should 
 have lasted a hundred must seem a miracle to 
 those who fail to take into account the agency of 
 the two guardian angels of national life, religion 
 and war religion which keeps alive the humility 
 and generosity of reasonable submission to law 
 and the spirit of self-sacrifice for corporate life; 
 and war, which silences for a time the envy and 
 hatred of the evil and ignorant for moral and 
 circumstantial superiorities, and compels them to 
 trust their established leaders on pain of prompt 
 annihilation. 
 
 Even our great " liberal " prophet, Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer, is compelled, in spite of himself, to 
 prophesy with terror of what he rightly calls " the 
 coming slavery," the despotism, not of a single 
 irresponsible tyrant, who must content himself 
 with doing good or evil in so general a way that 
 the sense of private compulsion or injury would
 
 n8 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 
 
 weigh little on each individual, but the paltry 
 and prying despotism of the vestry the more 
 "virtuous" the more paltry and prying perse- 
 cuting each individual by the intrusion of its 
 myriad-handed, shifting, ignorant, and irresistible 
 tyranny into the regulation of our labour, our 
 household, and our very victuals, and, however 
 " pure " in its abstract intention, necessarily cor- 
 rupt in its application by its agents, since men, as 
 a rule, are corrupt. Indications are not wanting 
 of the sort of " government " we are committed 
 to, unless the coming war shall leave us in the 
 grip of a less irksome tyranny. It will be a 
 despotism which will have to be mitigated by 
 continual " tips," as the other kind has had to 
 be by occasional assassination. Neither the voter 
 nor the inspector yet know their power and oppor- 
 tunities ; but they soon will. We shall have to 
 " square " the district surveyor once or twice a 
 year, lest imaginary drains become a greater 
 terror than real typhoid ; we shall have to smoke 
 our pipes secretly and with a sense of sin, lest the 
 moral supervisor of the parish should decline our 
 offer of half-a-crown for holding his nose during 
 his weekly examination of our bedrooms and 
 closets ; the good Churchman will have to receive 
 Communion under the "species" of ginger-ale - 
 as some advanced congregations have already
 
 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK n 9 
 
 proposed unless the parson can elude the church- 
 warden with white port, or otherwise persuade 
 him ; and, every now and then, all this will be 
 changed, and we shall have to tip our policemen 
 and inspectors for looking over our infractions of 
 popular moralities of a newer pattern. Our con- 
 dition will very much resemble Swedenborg's hell, 
 in which everybody is incessantly engaged in the 
 endeavour to make everybody else virtuous ; and 
 the only compensating comforts to the sane will 
 be that, though wine and tobacco, those natural 
 stimulants to good impulses and fruitful medita- 
 tions, may be denied him, he may find abundant 
 time and opportunity, in the cessation of all 
 external interests of a moral and intellectual 
 nature, for improving his own character, which, 
 perhaps, is, after all, the only way in which a man 
 can be sure of improving the world's ; and, further- 
 more, he will no longer be discomposed by the 
 prospect of "national disaster," since there can 
 be no national disaster where there is no nation, 
 however freely the gutters may run with blood. 
 Private disaster, in such an infernal millennium, 
 will be a trifle. 
 
 Under such conditions, secret societies of dis- 
 contented and hopeless minorities will abound. 
 Dynamite will often shake the nerves of smug 
 content, and enrage the People beyond bounds at
 
 120 A " PESSIMIST " OUTLOOK 
 
 such revolt against its infallible decrees. But 
 none of these societies will be so hateful as the 
 secret and inevitable aristocracy of the remnant 
 that refuses to give interior assent to the divinity 
 of the Brummagem Baal. Its members will ac- 
 quire means of association and methods of forbid- 
 ding intrusion which will infuriate the rest, who, 
 in their turn, will invent tests for the discovery, in 
 order to the punishment, of these " enemies of 
 mankind," as the Dutch traders in Japan did, in 
 inviting all persons of doubtful character to 
 trample on the crucifix. 
 
 I have called these glances at the near future 
 " pessimist," because that is the word now 
 generally applied to all such forecasts as are 
 made by those who do not ignore or pervert 
 patent facts. " Optimists," as far as I can gather, 
 are those who hope all things from " local option."
 
 XVIII 
 
 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 
 
 SOME learned men have maintained that we can 
 know nothing. The truth is better stated by St. 
 Paul : " If a man thinks that he knows anything, 
 he knows nothing as he ought," that is nothing 
 other than imperfectly. It is the more difficult to 
 deal systematically with this matter, because we 
 want, in our tongue, words of such relative mean- 
 ing as scire, cognoscere, intelligere^ etc. I propose 
 only to run together a few such observations as 
 simple good sense can make, and accept, and 
 find use for. 
 
 A great and increasing proportion of persons 
 would, if you asked them, maintain that all con- 
 victions are merely opinions. But it is not so. 
 A fool may opine absolutely that a wise man is a 
 fool, but the wise man knows that the fool is one. 
 The same or opposite conclusions, political or
 
 122 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 otherwise, may be arrived at by two persons from 
 a view of the same facts, and each may be equally 
 confident ; but the conclusions of one may be 
 knowledge, and those of the other opinion. The 
 reality of the difference is indicated by the difference 
 of the feelings which commonly subsist between 
 those who opine and those who know. Those 
 who opine hate those who know, and who speak 
 as those who know. They think it an assumption 
 of superiority, whereas it is only its reality, and 
 cannot but appear more or less in its manner of 
 expression. Those who know, are contemptuous 
 or indifferent only towards such as impudently 
 or ignorantly opine. The consequence is that the 
 knowledge which is wisdom is nowhere as an 
 acknowledged force and factor in worldly affairs, 
 and is able to assert itself only sub rasa, or by 
 accident, or by the more or less underhand 
 management of folly and ignorance. 
 
 What most people call " deep and earnest con- 
 victions" on political and social topics are generally 
 muddle-headed medleys of knowledge of fact and 
 opinion. They know that such and such a thing 
 is an evil, and they opine that they see a way to 
 amend it ; and if wiser people point out to them 
 that the evil would not be so amended, or that 
 greater evils would accrue from the attempt, they 
 only feel that their " convictions " are affronted
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 123 
 
 and opposed by cold-blooded calculations. This 
 kind of opinion is often as confident as actual 
 knowledge. When Carlyle said that it was im- 
 possible to believe a lie, he can only have meant 
 that it was impossible to believe it with that 
 highest kind of certitude which consists in intel- 
 lectual perception. Probably no one could believe 
 a lie with that degree of faith which would enable 
 him to suffer deliberate martyrdom for it. Pro- 
 testant and Catholic martyrs have usually been 
 sufferers for one and the same faith, or, at least, 
 parts of the same faith, in which parts they have 
 considered the whole to be involved. Very few, 
 if any, have ever carried the courage of mere 
 " opinions " to the stake. 
 
 There can be no absolute certitude about the 
 impressions of the senses or the inferences drawn 
 from them. There can be about moral and 
 spiritual things. The knave may sincerely opine 
 that it is best for his interests to lie and cheat ; 
 but the honest man knows that he is a being 
 whose interests are above all external contin- 
 gencies, and that under certain circumstances it 
 would be madness to behave otherwise than in a 
 way which would be directly opposed to every 
 argument and persuasion of the senses. It is 
 only the mind of the most highly " scientific " 
 constitution that will have its confidence in know-
 
 124 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 ledge of this kind tried by considerations of its 
 moral and intellectual obligations to Hottentots 
 and Australian aborigines. " We can live in 
 houses without being architects " ; and we can 
 know, without knowing or caring to know how 
 we came by our knowledge. The house of the 
 gods has lasted intact since Abraham and Hesiod, 
 and shows no sign yet of tumbling about our ears. 
 
 The faculty of knowing, as differing from that of 
 opining, seems, as might be expected from what 
 has been said, to have as much to do with the 
 character of the will as with that of the mind. To 
 be honest, Shakespeare tells us, is to be one in 
 ten thousand ; and to discern intellectually, or to 
 know, is a part, and a very great part, of honesty. 
 A man may have learned a dozen languages, and 
 have the whole circle of the sciences at his ringers' 
 ends, and may know nothing worthy of being 
 called knowledge ; indeed, there is nothing which 
 seems to be a greater hindrance to the acquisition 
 of living knowledge than an engrossing devotion 
 to the acquisition of words, facts, logical methods, 
 and natural laws. It requires little learning to 
 make a wise or truly knowing man, but much 
 learning may not impossibly spoil one. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold has said that a thorough 
 classical education has often the same effects on a 
 man's character as a grave experience. The
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 125 
 
 reason is that it is a grave experience, a long 
 series of small exercises of honesty, patience, and 
 self-sacrifice, the sum of which is equal to a great 
 and soul -sobering calamity. The author of the 
 Imitation notes a kindred fact when he says, " No 
 man can know anything till he is tried.". Not 
 only is the discipline of such an education, which, 
 in its early stage at least, has much in it that is 
 repugnant and compulsory, fitted to qualify the 
 character for the reception of true knowledge, but 
 it conveys also, in an eminent degree, the matter 
 of true knowledge. Without any disrespect to 
 Professor Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and Pro- 
 fessor Max M tiller, we may affirm that the man 
 who knew Plato, Homer, and ^Eschylus rightly, 
 and knew little else, would know far more than 
 he who knew all that these great scientists could 
 teach, and knew nothing else. 
 
 The man who knows, often finds himself at 
 great disadvantage in the presence of fact-gatherers 
 and persons who opine. His attitude is necessarily 
 affirmative, and often, to the great scandal and 
 contempt of his adversaries, simply affirmative. 
 It does not enter into his calculations to have 
 to defend actively a position which he sees to be 
 impregnable ; and when he leaves his proper occu 
 pation of " climbing trees in the Hesperides " to 
 wield his club against those who know of no such
 
 126 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 trees, he is like a Hercules fighting mosquitoes. 
 They cannot even see his club, and the conflict 
 generally ends, as did that between the Lady and 
 Comus with an angry and wholly unconvincing 
 assertion of incompetence. 
 
 Fain would I something say, yet to what end ? 
 
 Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend 
 
 The sublime notion and high mystery 
 
 That must be utter'd to unfold the sage 
 
 And serious doctrine of virginity. 
 
 And thou art worthy that thou should'st not know 
 
 More happiness than is thy present lot. 
 
 Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric. 
 
 That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence ; 
 
 Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced. 
 
 Wordsworth, in a still greater passion, calls his 
 scientific adversary " a fingering slave." Of course 
 this sort of thing tends to make the relations of 
 the parties unpleasant ; and in the eyes of the 
 world the man of immense " information " and 
 convinced ignorance goes off with the laurels. 
 
 Metaphysics for the most part are justly open 
 to the objection that they attempt to explain things 
 which Aristotle declares to be too simple to be 
 intelligible things which we cannot see with 
 definiteness, not because they are beyond the 
 focus of the mind's eye, but because they are too 
 much within it. The metaphysician Hegel says
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 127 
 
 that the sense of honour arises from our conscious- 
 ness of infinite personal value. This may not be 
 wholly satisfactory, but it is helpful ; it is a part 
 of the truth. But what do physicists make of 
 such things as honour and chastity ? They cer- 
 tainly endeavour to explain such ideas and feelings 
 as they do everything else, but their explanations 
 necessarily discredit these and all other things 
 which profess to have " infinite value," and which 
 wise men know to have infinite value. 
 
 The knowledge which can be made common to 
 all, is a foundation upon which a certain increasing 
 school, finding popular "opinion" too sandy, is 
 endeavouring to build up a new state of things, 
 religious, moral, political, and social. This kind 
 of " positivism," which claims for its sanction the 
 common, that is to say, the lowest experience of 
 mankind, is and always has been the religion of 
 the vulgar, to whatever class they belong. The 
 growth of an unconscious and undogmatic posi- 
 tivism among the people at large is perhaps the 
 most notable fact of the time. It shows itself not 
 only in an increasing impatience of the notion that 
 there is any reality which cannot be seen and felt, 
 but in an intolerance even of any experience which 
 is not, or cannot immediately be made, the ex- 
 perience of all. As boards and committees pro- 
 verbially have to work on the level of the least
 
 128 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 wise of their members, so the ideal perfection of 
 this positivism would be government by the insight 
 of the greatest dunderhead, since his experiences 
 and perceptions alone would be sufficiently com- 
 municable to have the character of universality. 
 Under such ideal conditions, every reality that 
 makes life human would be completely eliminated. 
 A man who should be detected in secretly enter- 
 taining principles of abstract honour, or trying to 
 form his life upon the pattern of a beauty unknown 
 to the arch-dunderhead, would fare as it fared in 
 Athens with the man who dared to crown his 
 house with a pediment ; and vestries, consisting 
 of the prophets of commonplace and popular 
 experience, would vote everything in painting 
 and poetry to be " bosh " which should be more 
 esoteric in character than Frith's "Railway 
 Station " or Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy. 
 Science has already come very generally to 
 mean, not that which may be known, but only 
 such knowledge as every animal with faculties a 
 little above those of an ant or a beaver can be 
 induced to admit. Incommunicable knowledge, 
 or knowledge which can be communicated at 
 present only to a portion perhaps a small portion 
 of mankind, is already affirmed to be no know- 
 ledge at all. A man who knows and acts up to 
 his knowledge that it is better to suffer or inflict
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 129 
 
 any extremity of temporal evil, than to lie or 
 cheat, though he may not be able to give any 
 universally intelligible account of his knowledge, 
 is already beginning to be looked upon as a prig 
 or a fanatic ; and chastity is already widely 
 declared to be one of the " dead virtues," and 
 marriage only legalised fornication, because " the 
 sublime notion and high mystery that must be 
 uttered to unfold the sage and serious doctrine " 
 of purity must be taken, if taken at all by the 
 many, upon trust. 
 
 The pure and simple ideal of life founded upon 
 facts of universal experience is, however, too base 
 ever to be perfectly attained in this world. There 
 will always be a lingering suspicion with many 
 that some have powers of discernment and an 
 experience which are not granted to all ; there 
 will always be hidden heretics who will believe 
 that there are realities which cannot be seen or 
 touched by the natural eye or hand, or even by 
 the rational perception of the many ; and the 
 present downward tendency may perhaps be 
 checked, or at least delayed, by recalling to the 
 minds of men that, as yet, we are all living 
 more or less by faith in the better knowledge 
 of the few, and by reminding them of that abyss 
 towards which a new step is taken whenever any 
 item of that knowledge is denied in order to 
 
 K
 
 J30 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 widen the foundations of the throne of popular 
 experience. 
 
 The religion of universal experience must of 
 course begin, as the dogmatic positivist insists, in 
 the denial of God, or, what is exactly equivalent, 
 in the assertion that, if God exists, He is altogether 
 unknowable and removed from the practical in- 
 terests of life. Now, let it be remembered that 
 for a man to deny that God can be known is quite 
 a different thing from his not being able to affirm, 
 from positive knowledge, the reverse. A very 
 small minority of mankind, but a minority which 
 includes almost all who have attained the highest 
 peaks of heroic virtue and many who have been 
 no less eminent for power of intellect and practical 
 wisdom, have declared that, to them at least, God 
 is knowable, communicable with, and personally 
 discernible with a certainty which exceeds all other 
 certainties ; and they have further affirmed that 
 this knowledge comes and can only come from a 
 man's putting himself en rapport with the Divinity 
 by an, in the beginning, more or less experimental 
 faith, and by a conformity to the dictates of the 
 highest conscience, so perfect as to involve, for a 
 considerable period at least, laborious and painful 
 self-denial. Now it would be placing oneself upon 
 a level with such assertors of the highest know- 
 ledge to say that one knows that these declarations
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 131 
 
 are true, however strong the presumption of their 
 truth may appear ; but it is simply vulgar and 
 brutal impudence for any one to assert posi- 
 tively that they are untruths or illusions, merely 
 because his own experience or that of his pot- 
 companions contains nothing which gives the least 
 clue to their meaning. The reductio ad absurdum 
 becomes complete when the same argument is 
 carried into regions of more extended experience. 
 A drunken bargeman has exactly the same right 
 to deny the reality of the asserted experiences of a 
 Petrarch or a Wordsworth as these would have to 
 deny those of the saint or the apostle ; and to 
 descend a few steps farther, the amateur of 
 abominable delights and the violator of natural 
 relationships would justly, upon the widest experi- 
 mental grounds, claim exemption from a condem- 
 nation chiefly founded upon an obscure perception 
 and an intuitive horror of which he for his part 
 had no experience. 
 
 Popular positivism will, however, always stop 
 short of the length to which the doctrines of its 
 prophets would lead it, and will, from time to time, 
 be beaten back into the paths of the positivism of 
 the nobler few on which all virtue and religion are 
 founded, by finding itself in contact with the 
 tremendous paradox, that the most universally 
 beneficial and admired fruits of civilisation are and
 
 132 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 always have been gathered from trees of which the 
 roots are wholly out of common view. The heroes 
 themselves of the people will always refute popular 
 experience better than any philosopher can. Though 
 a Gladstone may dazzle them for a day by invest- 
 ing with a fatuous glamour the principles and 
 platitudes with which the vulgar are familiar, it is 
 to a Gordon, with inimitable courage and honour, 
 the obvious outcome of unintelligible thoughts and 
 experiences, that they will look with abiding 
 reverence and an elevating instinct that such 
 men habitually move about in worlds by them 
 unrealised. 
 
 The immense and unalterable inequalities in the 
 knowing faculties of man are the source and in 
 part the justification* of that social inequality which 
 roughly and very partially reflects them. Many 
 otherwise amiable and conservative thinkers have, 
 however, made the mistake of conceding that such 
 inequality is, abstractedly considered, an evil, 
 though a hopelessly incurable one. Conservative 
 teaching would be much more effective than it is 
 were it more frequently occupied with proving 
 that such inequality is no evil, but a very great 
 good for all parties. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, who sometimes let fall, in off-hand 
 talk, sayings of such depth, simplicity, and signifi- 
 cance that we must go back to the philosophers of
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 133 
 
 antiquity to find the like of them, once remarked 
 that " inequality is the source of all delight." This 
 saying, which must seem surprising to most 
 modern ears, is absolutely true and even demon- 
 strable. 
 
 All delight not all pleasure, which is quite a 
 different thing will be found, when thoroughly 
 examined, to consist in the rendering and receiv- 
 ing of love and the services of love. Hence the 
 great and fortunately inextinguishable fountains of 
 delight in the relationships of man and woman 
 and of parents and children. It is true that a low 
 and inorganic form of national polity may, to some 
 extent, suppress even these pure springs of felicity ; 
 but, so long as there are women and children in 
 the world, it can never become quite joyless. The 
 doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and equality are 
 known instinctively only by very bad children; and 
 most women, when once they have been in love, 
 repudiate such teaching indignantly, under what- 
 ever polity they may have been born. 
 
 Between unequals sweet is equal love ; 
 
 and the fact is that there is no love, and therefore 
 no sweetness, which is not thus conditioned ; 
 and the greater the inequality the greater the 
 sweetness. Hence the doctrine that infinite felicity 
 can arise only from the mutual love of beings
 
 134 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 infinitely unequal that is, of the creator and the 
 creature. Inequality, far from implying any dis- 
 honour on either side of the mutual compact of 
 love, is the source of honour to both. Hooker, 
 writing of marriage, says : " It is no small honour 
 to a man that a creature so like himself should be 
 subjected to him " ; and we all know that the 
 honour to woman which the chivalry of the middle 
 ages made an abiding constituent of civilisation, 
 was founded upon Catholic views of her subjection, 
 and the obligation to give special honour, as of 
 right, to the weaker vessel. Look also at the 
 relations which usually subsist between an heredi- 
 tary gentleman and his hereditary unequals and 
 dependants, and compare them with the ordinary 
 fraternal relations between a Radical master- 
 tradesman and his workmen. The intercourse 
 between the gentleman and his hind or labourer 
 is free, cheerful, and exhilarating, because there 
 is commonly in it the only equality worth regard- 
 ing, that of goodwill ; whereas the commands of 
 the sugar -boiler or the screw -maker to their 
 brothers are probably given with a frown and 
 received with a scowl. Social inequality, since it 
 arises from unalterable nature and inevitable 
 chance, is irritating only when it is not recognised. 
 The American plutocrat may be forced to travel 
 for a week in the company of a hodman, because
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 135 
 
 American theories discountenance first and third 
 class carriages ; but catch him speaking to him ! 
 Whereas an English duke, if by chance thrown 
 into the companionship of an honest countryman, 
 would be on the best of terms with him before an 
 hour was over, and the good understanding be- 
 tween the two would be made all the easier should 
 the latter have on his distinguishing smock-frock. 
 The genuine Tory is the most accessible of persons, 
 the genuine Radical the least so. The one takes 
 things as they are and must be, the other views 
 them as they are not and cannot be, and, kicking 
 against imaginary evils, often pays the penalty of 
 finding himself firmly saddled with the realities. 
 
 " One can live in a house without being an 
 architect," and it is not at all necessary that the 
 common people should understand the English 
 constitution in order to feel that their lives are 
 the sweeter and nobler because they are members 
 of its living organism. Not a ploughboy or a 
 milkmaid but would feel, without in the least 
 knowing why, that a light had passed from their 
 lives with the disappearance of social inequalities, 
 and the consequent loss of their dignity as integral 
 parts of a somewhat that was greater than them- 
 selves. 
 
 The other day, walking in a country lane, I saw 
 what appeared at a little distance to be a dying
 
 '36 
 
 animal. On a closer view it proved to be the 
 carcase of a sheep which had in great measure 
 been actually transformed into a mass of the soft, 
 white, malodorous grubs known to anglers by the 
 name of gentles. The struggles of these creatures 
 to get at the food which they concealed produced 
 a strong and regular pulsation throughout the 
 whole mass, and gave it a ghastly semblance of 
 breathing. The ordered state of England, accord- 
 ing to its ideal, which for many generations has 
 been more or less realised, compared with the 
 sort of democracy to which we are fast drifting 
 and have wellnigh attained, is much like the 
 animal in which myriads of individual organs, 
 nerves, veins, tissues, and cells formed subordi- 
 nated parts of one living thing, compared with 
 this pulsating mass of grubs, each one of which 
 had no thought but of its just share of carrion. 
 
 Democracy is only a continually shifting aris- 
 tocracy of money, impudence, animal energy, and 
 cunning, in which the best grub gets the best of 
 the carrion ; and the level to which it tends to 
 bring all things is not a mountain tableland, as 
 its promoters would have their victims think, but 
 the unwholesome platitude of the fen and the 
 morass, of which black envy would enjoy the 
 malaria so long as all others shared in it. What- 
 ever may be the pretences set forth by the lead-
 
 OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 137 
 
 ing advocates of such a state of things among us, 
 it is manifest enough that black envy is the principal 
 motive with many of them, who hate the beauty 
 of the ordered life to be ruling stars of which they 
 cannot attain, just as certain others are said to 
 " hate the happy light from which they fell." They 
 hate hereditary honours, chiefly because they pro- 
 duce hereditary honour and create a standard of 
 truth and courage for which even the basest are 
 the better in so far as they are shamed by it. Do 
 the United States, some may ask, justify this con- 
 demnation ? They are but a poor approach to 
 the idea of democracy which seems now about to 
 be realised among us : but they have already gone 
 a long way towards extinguishing that last glory 
 of, and now best substitute for, a generally extinct 
 religion a sense of honour among the people. 
 " Why, what a dern'd fool you must be !" exclaimed 
 a New York shopkeeper to a friend of mine, who 
 had received a dollar too much in changing a 
 note, and returned it. If there is a shopkeeper 
 in England who would think such a thing, there 
 is certainly not one who would dare to say it. 
 
 Nor, in losing sight of the sense of " infinite 
 personal value," which is the source of honour and 
 the growth of a long-enduring recognition of in- 
 evitable inequalities, have the Americans preserved 
 delight. Dr. Johnson's saying finds a remarkable
 
 138 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, ETC. 
 
 comment in the observation of a recent American 
 traveller : " In the United States there is every- 
 where comfort, but no joy." 
 
 To conclude, it is quite possible to change the 
 forms of social inequality, but to do away with the 
 fact is of all things the most impossible. It is the 
 trick or ignorance of the demagogue to charge 
 existing inequalities with the evils and injustices 
 in which they began, and with which they were 
 attended for a long time afterwards. When con- 
 quest or revolution establishes the ever-inevitable 
 political and social inequalities in new forms, it 
 takes many generations of misery and turmoil to 
 introduce into them the moral equality which 
 renders them not only tolerable, but the source of 
 true freedom and happiness.
 
 XIX 
 LOVE AND POETRY 
 
 EVERY man and woman who has not denied or 
 falsified nature knows, or at any rate feels, that 
 love, though the least " serious," is the most 
 significant of all things. The wise do not talk 
 much about this knowlege, for fear of exposing 
 its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the 
 profligate and unbelieving, and because its light, 
 though, and for the reason that, it exceeds all 
 other, is deficient in definition. But they see that 
 to this momentary transfiguration of life all that is 
 best in them looks forward or looks back, and that 
 it is for this the race exists, and not this for the 
 race the seed for the flower, not the flower for 
 the seed. All religions have sanctified this love, 
 and have found in it their one word for and image 
 of their fondest and highest hopes ; and the 
 Catholic has exalted it into a " great Sacrament," 
 holding that, with Transubstantiation which it
 
 140 LOVE AND POETRY 
 
 resembles it is unreasonable only because it is 
 above reason. "The love which is the best 
 ground of marriage," writes also the Protestant 
 and "judicious" Hooker, "is that which is least 
 able to render a reason for itself." Indeed, the 
 extreme unreasonableness of this passion, which 
 gives cause for so much blaspheming to the 
 foolish, is one of its surest sanctions and a main 
 cause of its inexhaustible interest and power ; for 
 who but a " scientist " values greatly or is greatly 
 moved by anything he can understand that 
 which can be comprehended being necessarily less 
 than we are ourselves ? 
 
 In this matter the true poet must always be a 
 mystic altogether to the vulgar, and more or 
 less to all who have not attained to his peculiar 
 knowledge. For what" is a mystery but that 
 which one does not know ? The common handi- 
 crafts used to be called mysteries ; and their 
 professors were mystics to outsiders exactly in 
 the sense that poets or theologians, with sure, but 
 to them uncommunicated and perhaps incom- 
 municable, knowledge, are mystics to the many. 
 The poet simply knows more than they do ; 
 but it flatters their malignant vanity to call him 
 names which they mean to be opprobrious, though 
 they are not, because he is not such a spiritual 
 pauper as themselves. But poets are mystics,
 
 LOVE AND POETRY 141 
 
 not only by virtue of knowledge which the greater 
 part of mankind does not possess, but also because 
 they deal with knowledge against which the ac- 
 cusation of dunces who know the differential 
 calculus is etymologically true namely, that it 
 is absurd. Love is eternally absurd, for that 
 which is the root of all things must itself be 
 without root. Aristotle says that things are 
 unintelligible to man in proportion as they are 
 simple ; and another says, in speaking of the 
 mysteries of love, that the angels themselves 
 desire in vain to look into these things. 
 
 In the hands of the poet, mystery does not hide 
 knowledge, but reveals it as by its proper medium. 
 Parables and symbols are the only possible modes 
 of expressing realities which are clear to percep- 
 tion though dark to the understanding. "With- 
 out a parable he spake not " who always spake 
 of primary realities. Every spiritual reality fades 
 into something else, and none can tell the point 
 at which it fades. The only perfectly definite 
 things in the universe are the conceptions of a 
 fool, who would deny the sun he lives by if he 
 could not see its disc. Natural sciences are definite, 
 because they deal with laws which are not realities 
 but conditions of realities. The greatest and per- 
 haps the only real use of natural science is to supply 
 similes and parables for poets and theologians.
 
 142 LOVE AND POETRY 
 
 But if the realities of love were not in themselves 
 dark to the understanding, it would be necessary 
 to darken them not only lest they should be 
 profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says, 
 " The more the realities of heaven are clothed 
 with obscurity, the more they delight and attract, 
 and nothing so much heightens longing as such 
 tender refusal." "Night," says the inspirer of 
 St. Bernard, " is the light of my pleasures." 
 
 Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any 
 other passion ; and for that cause its head, like 
 that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into heaven. 
 The heights demand and justify the depths, as 
 giving them substance and credibility. " That He 
 hath ascended what is it but because He first 
 also descended into the lower parts of the earth ? " 
 Love "reconciles the -highest with the lowest, 
 ordering all things strongly and sweetly from end 
 to end." St. Bernard says that " divine love " 
 (religion) " has its first root in the most secret of 
 the human affections." This affection is the only 
 key to the inner sanctuaries of that faith which 
 declares, "Thy Maker is thy Husband;" the 
 only clue by which searchers of the " secret of 
 the King," in the otherwise inscrutable writings of 
 prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes, 
 w the loving hint that meets the longing guess," 
 which looks to the future for the satisfying and
 
 LOVE AND POETRY 143 
 
 abiding reality, the passage of whose moment- 
 ary shadow forms the supreme glory of our 
 mortality. 
 
 The whole of after-life depends very much upon 
 how life's transient transfiguration in youth by 
 love is subsequently regarded ; and the greatest 
 of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his 
 readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of 
 nature as well as religion, " Let not my heart 
 forget the things mine eyes have seen." The 
 greatest perversion of the poet's function is to 
 falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the 
 senses and to make light of its sacramental 
 character. This character is instantly recognised 
 by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every 
 youth and maiden ; but it is very easily forgotten 
 and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld 
 by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its 
 prophets all the more powerful because, like the 
 prophets of old, they are wholly independent of 
 the priests, and are often the first to discover and 
 rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is 
 always tending to fall. If society is to survive its 
 apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly 
 by guarding and increasing the purity of the 
 sources in which society begins. The world is 
 finding out, as it has often done before, and more 
 or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion.
 
 144 LOVE AND POETRY 
 
 Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. 
 What love does in transfiguring life, that religion 
 does in transfiguring love : as any one may see 
 who compares one state or time with another. 
 Love is sure to be something less than human if 
 it is not something more ; and the so-called ex- 
 travagances of the youthful heart, which always 
 claims a character for divinity in its emotions, 
 fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, re- 
 action, if those claims are not justified to the 
 understanding by the faith which declares man 
 and woman to be priest and priestess to each 
 other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and 
 proclaimed in the words " Let us make man in 
 our own image " and " male and female created he 
 them." Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of 
 love to the higher feelings unless the parties to 
 them are conscious and true lovers always are 
 that, for the season at least, they justify the words 
 " I have said, Ye are gods." Nuptial love bears 
 the clearest marks of being nothing other than the 
 rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. "Its 
 felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase 
 from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to 
 desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance 
 in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved ; 
 and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, with- 
 out which love cannot long exist as emotion."
 
 LOVE AND POETRY 145 
 
 Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, 
 and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded 
 as a "great sacrament." It is the inculcation of 
 this significance which has made love between 
 man and woman what it is now at least to the 
 idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is 
 time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced 
 more clearly. Love being much more respected 
 and religion much less than of old, the danger of 
 profanation is not so great as it was when religion 
 was revered and love despised. The most char- 
 acteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most 
 alluring of her weaknesses her not caring for 
 masculine truth and worth unless they woo her 
 with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of 
 her senses is the prevailing vice of most men, 
 especially in these times. This general effeminacy 
 is the poet's great opportunity. It is his pontifical 
 privilege to feel the truth ; and his function is to 
 bridge the gulf between severe verity and its 
 natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech 
 which, without any sacrifice of the former, is 
 " simple, sensuous, and passionate." He insinu- 
 ates in nerve-convincing music the truths which 
 the mass of mankind must feel before they believe. 
 He leads them by their affections to things above 
 their affections, making Urania acceptable to 
 them by her prsenomen Venus. He is the apostle 
 L
 
 146 LOVE AND POETRY 
 
 of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any 
 flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which 
 the chosen people have too often denied or 
 disgraced in their eyes.
 
 XX 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 IT is "of faith " that the woman's claim to the 
 honour of man lies in the fact of her being the 
 "weaker vessel." It would be of no use to prove 
 what every Christian man and woman is bound to 
 believe, and what is, indeed, obvious to the senses 
 of any sane man and woman whatever. But a 
 few words of random comment on the text may, 
 by adding to faith knowledge, make man and 
 woman woman especially more thankful than 
 before for those conditions which constitute the 
 chief felicity of her life and his, and which it is 
 one of the chief triumphs of progress to render 
 ever more and more manifest. The happiest 
 result of the " higher education " of woman can- 
 not fail to consist in the rendering of her weak- 
 ness more and more daintily conspicuous. How 
 much sweeter to dry the tears that flow because 
 one cannot accede to some demonstrable fallacy
 
 148 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 in her theory of variable stars, than to kiss her 
 into conformity as to the dinner-hour or the fitness 
 or unfitness of such-or-such a person to be asked 
 to a picnic ! How much more dulcet the dultis 
 Amaryllidis ira when Amaryllis knows Sophocles 
 and Hegel by heart, than when her accomplish- 
 ments extend only to a moderate proficiency in 
 French and the pianoforte ! It is a great con- 
 solation to reflect that, among all the bewildering 
 changes to which the world is subject, the char- 
 acter of woman cannot be altered ; and that, so 
 long as she abstains from absolute outrages against 
 nature such as divided skirts, free-thinking, tri- 
 cycles, and Radicalism neither Greek, nor conic 
 sections, nor political economy, nor cigarettes, nor 
 athletics can ever really do other than enhance 
 the charm of that sweet unreasonableness which 
 humbles the gods to the dust and compels them 
 to adore the lace below the last hem of her bro- 
 cade ! It is owing to this ineradicable perfection 
 that time cannot change nor custom stale her in- 
 finite variety. 
 
 A French writer has complained that there are 
 not more than about twenty-five species of woman. 
 Had not his senses been Frenchified, he would 
 have perceived that every woman is a species in 
 herself nay, many species. The aspects of 
 reason are finite, but those of unreason infinite ;
 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL 149 
 
 and, so long as one woman is left in the world, 
 no poet can want a perfectly unspoilt subject, and 
 one which can never be fathomed. Some poet 
 has, with much vraisemblance, represented Jove 
 as creating woman in order that there might be 
 at least one thing in the universe that should have 
 for him the zest of unintelligibility which nothing 
 but weakness and unreason could supply. The 
 human creature, however, is incapable of the ab- 
 solutely incomprehensible ; therefore it has been 
 providentially devised that no man should be 
 without some touch of womanhood, and no 
 woman without some manhood. Were it other- 
 wise, they would be wholly uninteresting to one 
 another, and could no more mix than oil and 
 water. This reciprocal tincture of each other's 
 sex produces that mixture of inscrutability and 
 comprehensibility in the well-constituted and well- 
 matched man and woman, and that endless mis- 
 understanding, mitigated by obscure insight, which, 
 if not the original cause of love, is the source of 
 that perpetual agitation of the feelings which in- 
 definitely increases love, and without which love, 
 if it did not die, would at least go to sleep. " Fax 
 agitando magis ardescit." 
 
 Most of the failures in marriage come of the 
 man's not having manhood enough to assert the 
 prerogatives which it is the woman's more or less
 
 ISO THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 secret delight to acknowledge. She knows her 
 place, but does not know how to keep it unless he 
 knows it also ; and many an otherwise amiable 
 woman grows restless and irritable under the in- 
 supportable doubt as to whether she has got her 
 master. In order to put the question to the test, 
 she does things she knows he is bound to resist or 
 resent, in the hope of being put down with a high 
 hand and perhaps a bad word or two since even 
 the mildest corporal chastisement has gone out 
 with the heroic days of such lovers as Siegfried 
 and Kriemhild. 
 
 Friendship and love differ mainly in this : that, 
 whereas the felicity of friendship consists in a 
 mutual interchange of benefits, intellectual and 
 otherwise, that of love is in giving on one part 
 and receiving on the 'other, with a reciprocal per- 
 ception of how sweet it is to the endower to endow 
 and the receiver to receive. This relation involves, 
 as ancient philosophers and theologians have ob- 
 served, a certain opulence on the one side and a 
 corresponding destitution on the other a destitu- 
 tion which, however, is the greatest opulence in 
 the eyes of the former as being the necessary con- 
 dition of his proper delight, which is to endow. 
 The myth of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid 
 is representative of the most perfect nuptial re- 
 lationship.
 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL 151 
 
 All joy worth the name is in equal love between 
 unequals ; and the inmost delight of giving honour 
 lies in its being of voluntary favour, and that of 
 receiving it in the perception that the rendering 
 of it is an infatuation of love on the part of the 
 giver. Desert cares as little for honour as it is in 
 the habit of receiving it. The vanity of a woman 
 need not derogate from that sense of comparative 
 nothingness which is to herself the sweetest part 
 of the offering of her affection. Indeed, her vanity 
 may be based upon this sense of her smallness, 
 as knowing that this is the source of her at- 
 tractiveness. A woman without the vanity which 
 delights in her power of attracting would be by 
 that very fact without power to attract ; for she 
 would want the power to receive that which the 
 man delights to give namely, that tender cor- 
 roboration and consummation of her sense of her 
 own sweetness, which every lover imagines that 
 he of all men is alone able to confer upon her. 
 
 As to the unreason of woman, there is a positive 
 character about it which elevates it from defect 
 into a sort of sacred mystery. " Perhaps," says 
 Thomas Hardy, the greatest living authority on 
 the subject, " in no minor point does woman 
 astonish her helpmate more than in the strange 
 power she possesses of believing cajoleries that 
 she knows to be false, except, indeed, in that of
 
 S2 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 being utterly sceptical on strictures which she 
 knows to be true." Philip van Artevelde says 
 with perfect truth as to the fact, but with a most 
 erroneous implied inference " How little flatter- 
 ing is a woman's love !" They understand little 
 of love who do not see how great a part is played 
 in it by mirth and paradox, and how the surprise 
 of finding oneself loved the more for a kiss or a 
 compliment makes up abundantly for the dis- 
 appointment of discovering that the greatest merits 
 or self-sacrifice do not count for much in com- 
 parison. 
 
 When the Father of Gods and men presented 
 the newly created woman to the Council of Olym- 
 pus, we know that she was greeted with peals of 
 laughter ; and to this day there is nothing that a 
 woman of well-balanced mind hates more in a man 
 than his taking her too much au grand serieux. 
 
 It has been the practice of the Catholic Church 
 not to define a dogma, nor to promulgate it as a 
 necessary part of faith, until it has come to be 
 widely denied ; and that Church to which all truly 
 sensible persons, be they Catholic or otherwise, 
 belong, is ever careful to abstain from formulating 
 doctrines so long as they continue to constitute 
 portions of the implicit and active belief of man- 
 kind in general. Words tend to obscure and 
 blunt the edge of truth, which is better felt than
 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL 153 
 
 spoken ; but when it is no longer generally felt, 
 and is widely spoken against, then there is no help 
 for it but to hurl anathemas against its deniers. 
 Now it is high time that it should be plainly 
 declared that there are few more damnable heresies 
 than the doctrine of the equality of man and woman. 
 It strikes at the root of the material and spiritual 
 prosperity and felicity of both, and vitiates the 
 whole life of society in its source. From time to 
 time in the world's past history, the inferiority 
 and consequent subordination of woman have been 
 denied by some fanatic or insignificant sect of 
 fanatics, and the cudgels have been taken up for 
 man by some busybody in his premature dread of 
 the " monstrous regiment of women " ; but the 
 consensus of the world has until lately been dead 
 against the notion. Every man Jack would have 
 listened with a cheery laugh at the setting up of a 
 claim of equality on the part of his dame 'Jill ; and 
 Aristotle, Bacon, and St. Thomas Aquinas would 
 have regarded with silent wonder the idea of rais- 
 ing to an equal rank with her lord the placens 
 uxor whom the Angelical Doctor declares to be 
 " scarcely a reasonable creature." Here and 
 there, indeed, a " poet sage " has glorified the 
 woman in terms that, taken literally, are violently 
 heterodox ; but everybody knew what he meant 
 in thus making a divinity of her whose very ex-
 
 154 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 cellence consists in her being decidedly a little 
 lower than the angels those transmitters of the 
 divinity of which she is only the last reflector. 
 Lovers, also, have in all ages practised a playful 
 idolatry ; and if they are beginning now to drop 
 the language of hyperbole, it is because they are 
 liable now to be believed. The ideal position of 
 woman towards man, according to the doctrine of 
 the Church which, in this instance at least, is 
 verifiable by all who have the power of psycho- 
 logical observation is that of his reflection or 
 "glory." She is the sensible glory or praise of 
 his spiritual wisdom, as the rising cloud of incense 
 is that of the invisible sunshine, which, passing 
 through the painted window, becomes manifest in 
 all its rainbow hues only when it strikes upon the 
 otherwise colourless vapour. The world which 
 sometimes fancies that it is being extremely 
 cynical when it is only expressing emphatically 
 some Christian and philosophical verity ex- 
 presses this fact when it says that the virtue of 
 woman is the noblest invention of man. She has 
 not the strength for, or indeed the knowledge of, 
 true virtue and grace of character, unless she is 
 helped to that knowledge and strength by the 
 man. 
 
 " He for God only, she for God in him." 
 
 She only really loves and desires to become what
 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL 155 
 
 he loves and desires her to be ; and beauty, being 
 visible or reflected goodness, can exist in woman 
 only when and in proportion as the man is 
 strong, good, and wise. When man becomes 
 womanish, and ceases to be the transmitter of the 
 heavenly light of wisdom, she is all abroad, she 
 does not know what to do with herself, and begins 
 to chatter or scream about her rights ; but, in this 
 state, she has seldom understanding enough to 
 discern that her true right is to be well governed 
 by right reason, and, instead of pouring con- 
 tempt on her degraded companion for his 
 spiritual impotence, she tries all sorts of hope- 
 less tricks the most hopeless of all being 
 that of endeavouring to become manly in order 
 the better to attract him who has become 
 womanish. 
 
 To maintain that man and woman are equals 
 in intelligent action is just as absurd as it would 
 be to maintain that the hand that throws a ball 
 and the wall that casts it back are equal. The 
 woman has an exquisite perception and power 
 of admiring all the man can be or do. She 
 is the "glory" of his prowess and nobility in 
 war, statesmanship, arts, invention, and manners ; 
 and she is able to fulfil this, her necessary 
 and delightful function, just because she is 
 herself nothing in battle, policy, poetry, discovery,
 
 156 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 or original intellectual or moral force of any 
 kind. 
 
 The true happiness and dignity of woman are 
 to be sought, not in her exaltation to the level of 
 man, but in a full appreciation of her inferiority 
 and in the voluntary honour which every manly 
 nature instinctively pays to the weaker vessel. In 
 the infinite distance between God and man, theo- 
 logians find the secret of the infinite felicity of 
 divine love ; and the incomparable happiness of 
 love between the sexes is similarly founded upon 
 their inequality. The playfulness which is the 
 very dainty and " bouquet " of love, comes of the 
 fact that in the mutual worship of lovers there is 
 always a tacit understanding of something of a 
 King Cophetua and Beggar- Maid relationship. 
 No right-minded woman would care a straw for 
 her lover's adoration if she did not know that he 
 knew that after all he was the true divinity. 
 
 There is a mystic craving in the great to be- 
 come the love-captive of the small, while the small 
 has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment of 
 the great. 
 
 " 'Tis but in such captivity 
 
 The boundless heavens know what they be." 
 
 The central prophecy in the Old Testament is 
 that "A man shall be compassed by a woman.'
 
 THE WEAKER VESSEL J 57 
 
 This wonder, which is applied by the Prophet to 
 higher things, is also the secret of human love 
 and its marvellous order. The infinite circum- 
 scribed by the finite, the great by the small, is 
 the insoluble paradox which teases human affection 
 with inexhaustible delight, as it is the thought 
 which kindles and keeps alive the devotion of the 
 Saint. 
 
 When this order ceases to exist, and with it the 
 life and delight of love, it is wholly the man's 
 fault. A woman will consent to be small only 
 when the man is great ; but then she sets no 
 bounds to her sweet self-humiliation, and by be- 
 coming the slave of his reason she reduces him to 
 a like captivity to her desires. The widely ex- 
 tended impatience of women under the present 
 condition of things is nothing but an unconscious 
 protest against the diminished manliness of men. 
 When a large proportion of our male population 
 are thrilled with effeminate pain if an injury is 
 done to the skin of a cat or of an Irish rebel, but 
 feel no indignation or anguish at the violation of 
 every sound principle and the deadening of every 
 sentiment that ennobles life, women feel that the 
 external conditions of true womanhood have dis- 
 appeared ; and it is not to be wondered at if 
 many of them, unclothed, as it were, of the senti- 
 ment of surrounding manhood, should, in their
 
 158 THE WEAKER VESSEL 
 
 ignorant discomfort and despair, make as un- 
 sightly a spectacle of themselves as does the animal 
 called a hermit-crab when, by some chance, it is 
 ejected, bare, comfortless, and unprotected, from 
 the shell of its adoption.
 
 XXI 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 WOMAN is the last and lowest of all spiritual 
 creatures ; made " a little lower than the angels " 
 to be " crowned with the glory and honour " 
 of being the final and visible reflection of the 
 beauty of God, which in itself no eye shall ever 
 otherwise see ; for " the beatific vision," as St. 
 Bernard says, " is not a thing that is seen, but a 
 substance which is sucked, as through a nipple." 
 The Blessed Virgin, " the holiest and humblest 
 of creatures," crowned with the glory and honour 
 of bearing God in her womb, is the one woman 
 in whom womanhood has been perfected, and in 
 whom the whole of womanhood has been more or 
 less reconstituted and glorified. 
 
 But though woman has thus been glorified by an 
 inconceivably higher circumstance of honour than 
 man, and has been made and declared to be not only 
 " Regina Mundi " but " Regina Cceli," man, in the
 
 160 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 order of being, is and will for ever be above her. He, 
 as man, seems to be, in some sort, the last of the 
 angelic order, being not only a reflection but also 
 a transmitter and messenger of the Divine original 
 Fatherhood, represented to the Blessed Virgin 
 herself in St. Joseph. Theology teaches that a 
 characteristic of all the angelic orders is the 
 capacity of assuming a double aspect. They can 
 turn their gaze directly upon God, a state which 
 St. Thomas Aquinas describes as the " Morning 
 Joy," or they can turn to God in his creature,, 
 which is said to be the " Evening Joy." The 
 Father alone looks for ever downward, and the 
 woman alone for ever upward, " her angel always 
 beholding the face" of the original divinity; and, 
 in whatever order an angelic substance may stand, 
 all orders below and above are, as it were, trans- 
 parent, the vision of each ending, in one direction, 
 in the Father, and, in the other, in the Woman, 
 that opaque surface in which the rays of Deity 
 end, and from which they are reflected in all the 
 multiplied splendours which they have gathered by 
 being transmitted through the prismatic and 
 refractive spheres that intervene. In this dupli- 
 cate order, each angelic entity represents and 
 contains the Divine Fatherhood for the entity next 
 .below, and the womanhood, its "glory" for that 
 next above ; a fact which Milton seems to have
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 161 
 
 discerned, without the aid of Catholic theology, 
 when he wrote 
 
 " Spirits at will 
 Can either sex assume ; " 
 
 and which every " Bride of Christ " who is also a 
 pure and ardent Lover discerns, when his eyes 
 are first opened, as by a deific flash, to the feminine 
 splendour, and he feels that " Dieu et ma 
 Dame " is no irreverent or hyperbolic legend for 
 his double but not divided worship. The ideal 
 womanhood, which only one woman has realised 
 fully, but which every woman seems to be capable 
 of more or less representing to some man, for at 
 least one moment in his life, is the photo- 
 sphere of God, the light and joy of the universe, 
 " Regina Mundi," as the glory of nature, and 
 " Regina Cceli " when she shall have become 
 nature glorified. 
 
 Man, then, as soon as he is made by grace a 
 participator of angelic and celestial powers, stands 
 between God and woman, and, as he pleases and 
 when he pleases, can take aspect as Bride to 
 Christ or bridegroom to woman, the Priestess 
 of the Divine Truth or Beauty to him, as he is 
 Priest of the Divine Love or Power to her. 
 
 To render this, the central fact of life, con- 
 ceivable and credible to such as have not attained 
 
 M
 
 162 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 to knowledge, those who know have remarked 
 certain analogies, say rather identities of Divine 
 and human love, of which, from reading and 
 hearing whereof I have kept no exact notes, I 
 will give a few examples. 
 
 The doctrine of election, which is such that it 
 can be neither accepted nor denied by the under- 
 standing, has its lively image in " the way of a 
 man with a maid," which, also, Solomon himself 
 confessed that he could not understand. The 
 man sees many maids, often of much more 
 apparent beauty and merit than the one he 
 chooses ; and, in his choice of her, there is no 
 compulsion. He may feel attracted by some- 
 what in her, but he is not in love with her, 
 until by an act of will, he abandons his will, 
 and assumes, by a "distinct act of election, a 
 state of mind towards her from which thence- 
 forward he is unable to withdraw himself, whereby 
 it becomes her manifest fault if she does not 
 " make her election sure " by offering no such 
 violence to love as must inevitably cause divorce. 
 
 Again, the Divine Lover, like a wise mortal 
 lover, knows well that, however favourably the 
 Soul may be disposed to Him, by His great- 
 ness, power, wealth, goodness, and abundant bene- 
 volence to her, He must desire her, and give her 
 some sensible proof by smile, touch, or caress, which
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 163 
 
 shall say to her heart, as the God of David says 
 to the chosen, " Rex concupiscet decorem tuum." 
 
 Again, God's strength, like man's, is perfected 
 in weakness. When the Soul has entered upon 
 her third and crowning stage of perfection and 
 union, His divine weakness for her gives Him far 
 more influence over her will than would be 
 obtained by any display of His power and other 
 attributes. As with a mortal lover, there is, as 
 some one has said, an appearance of infatuation 
 in the love of God for the elect soul. Though 
 just and beneficent to others, He has nothing but 
 boundless indulgence for her. " If she loves," 
 says Saint Augustine, " she may do as she likes." 
 He will forgive her, almost without asking, all 
 faults short of wilful and persistent infidelity, and, 
 since she herself hates them, He even loves her 
 the more for them. What ardent lover but 
 knows that the present faults and shortcomings of 
 the beloved are condiments and excitations of the 
 appetite of love, impediments in the current of his 
 passion which only render its self-willed and self- 
 rejoicing force more sensible and triumphant ? 
 And past corruptions that are really past and no 
 longer active are so far from hindering love that 
 they act as manure in which the seed of Divine 
 Love and the seed almost divine of a pure and 
 fervid mortal affection flourish wonderfully, many
 
 164 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 a Magdalen, the just envy of many who were 
 always pure, having been formed into a spouse, 
 " more innocent than any maid," by the inveterate 
 and purifying ardour of either love. 
 
 Again, as with a mortal lover, God does not 
 require any service of external "charity," etc., 
 from His beloved. Indeed, He complains, as He 
 did to Martha, of all attempts to please Him 
 otherwise than by giving Him her society and her 
 person in contemplation. " All," says St. Francis 
 of Sales, " must serve her " (the elect Soul), " but 
 she must serve none, not even her Divine Lover, 
 of whom she is not a servant but a spouse." He 
 reproves in her the kind of humility which He 
 requires of others, in whom He has not yet inspired 
 that perfection of intention which in her He regards 
 as attainment. He "also requires in her, as a 
 mortal lover does, that amount of " vanity," as 
 the world calls it, which sees and rejoices in her 
 own beauty ; for it is only her knowledge of her 
 own loveliness in His eyes which makes His love 
 credible to her, and it is only her belief in His 
 love which enables her to give that perfect re- 
 sponse of feeling which is love's fruition, and 
 causes her beauty to brighten more and more in 
 the joy of His flatteries, making her " sweet to 
 herself who is so sweet to Him." 
 
 Again, in either love, the one party retains a
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 165 
 
 power of absolute command, which he never uses, 
 while the other has an equal force of persuasion, 
 of which she avails herself abundantly. She 
 delights in calling herself his slave ; he delights in 
 being hers, and in boasting himself a " servant of 
 servants." 
 
 A mysterious longing for corporeal and spiritual 
 captivity to the beloved animates either kind of 
 love if, indeed, they be not really one in kind. 
 In love, the woman, who is " the body," desires 
 to be utterly captive to the man's will, and he, in 
 return, to be utterly captive to her body. His 
 soul lives in and is moved blissfully by every turn 
 of her head and motion of her limbs. He already 
 is carried hither and thither in all her movements, 
 although he is not yet numerically one flesh with 
 her ; but this is much more so with the Divine 
 Lover, who actually enjoys that distinctness in 
 identity to which the mortal lover only and for 
 ever in vain aspires, namely, to be "man com- 
 passed by a woman," as Isaiah says, speaking of that 
 Incarnation which is effected more or less in each 
 of the elect, as in Jesus Himself perfectly. These 
 two captivities constitute one freedom, and every 
 look and gesture of the beloved is a sacrament 
 and a common joy. As I have said elsewhere 
 
 "'Tis but in such captivity 
 The heavens themselves know what they be."
 
 166 DIJEU ET MA DAME 
 
 Another remarkable point in this divine analogy 
 is the reciprocal desire of the great for the small 
 and the small for the great. An ordinary man 
 requires in his mistress abilities corresponding to 
 his own, and he who cannot love much commonly 
 demands from her a great power of love for him. 
 A great man has a wilful and somewhat amused 
 delight (" Olli subridens") in binding himself in 
 wedlock to one who, indeed, implicitly believes in 
 his greatness, but who is really nothing but a 
 little, ignorant Love, who gives all her mite and 
 understands only caresses. To a great man and 
 to a God a little love is a great thing. As the 
 greatest of souls is infinitely little to God, it follows 
 that this peculiar source of felicity in extremes is, 
 in the divine marriage, unfathomable and inex- 
 haustible. 
 
 Another phenomenon common to both kinds 
 of love is the longing almost the first that arises 
 in every true lover's bosom to die for the sake 
 of the beloved. " I have longed for this hour," 
 said Our Lord. But none, save God, can die and 
 yet live for her. 
 
 Again, between lovers, things which, under 
 ordinary relationships, are only " counsels of per- 
 fection," become obligatory duties ; the least inat- 
 tention is almost a mortal offence, raising a cloud 
 of separation which nothing but bitter penance
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 167 
 
 and greater devotion than ever can dissipate ; 
 so that the spouse of God may well suspect the 
 reality of her position, if her life, in this world, is 
 not fuller of sorrows than of smiles, and if her 
 failures have not rendered her perfection sensibly 
 greater this week than it was last. 
 
 Again, in human as in divine love, " a part is 
 greater than the whole," and either love finds its 
 fruition in sacraments or symbols, which are parts 
 representing the whole. Even in the presence 
 of the beloved, the lover will choose to fix his soul 
 upon a ribbon or a lock of hair, intensifying his 
 apprehension of a too numerous and overwhelm- 
 ing beauty by thus focusing it on one point. 
 Another of the many paradoxes common to both 
 loves is, that they can see best in the dark. 
 " Night is the light of my pleasures." 
 
 Again, since, in this life, the wedlock of God 
 and the soul is, at best, only in its first stage or 
 betrothal, its felicities, to the soul at least, are, as 
 with the betrothed maiden, defective, full of unin- 
 telligible and impatient desires, and daily mingled 
 with the almost intolerable miseries of temporary 
 separation, which seems eternal ; for, while it 
 lasts, she cannot see her own beauty, which exists 
 for her only in the light of His countenance. 
 When thus He withdraws from her, she becomes 
 in her own eyes vile, unmeaning, and unlovely as
 
 168 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 the sheath of a lost sword, or the cast skin of a 
 serpent, and it is impossible at such times to give 
 a sensible belief to the certainty that she will, 
 ere long, be again alive with His life and splendid 
 with the reflection of His complacency. 
 
 Another most notable analogy of love is the 
 revelation, completion, and explanation of herself 
 which the lover in either case brings to the be- 
 loved. She is as the fragment of a "puzzle- 
 picture," until she encounters the destined 
 complement of her being, and the key to her 
 unintelligible dreams. They then suddenly be- 
 come such realities as make all other realities 
 dreams. She dares not believe or accept the 
 wonders of her position until she discerns that 
 acceptance of them is imposed on her by duty and 
 faith. Then she can no more doubt that, through 
 all the range of her constitution, she is the blissful 
 reciprocal of him whom she adores, than she could 
 doubt of her own existence, which, indeed, with- 
 out him, would now be no existence. In him is the 
 only possible satisfaction of her rational, voluntary, 
 and sensitive life, and she attains to fathomless 
 content in the extremes of reverence for and in- 
 timacy with him. 
 
 But this is perhaps the greatest and itost in- 
 scrutable of all the mysteries -common to either 
 kind of love there is, in its felicity, the coexist-
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 169 
 
 ence of a celestial and exceedingly virginal pride 
 with an insatiable appetite for its surrender and 
 sacrifice. Theologians say that the essential of 
 the Sacrifice of the Altar is the infinite humiliation 
 suffered by the Second Person of the Holy Trinity 
 in becoming flesh in the moment of transubstan- 
 tiation ; and has not this humiliation its analogue 
 in the case of the Virgin when she allows her love 
 and beauty, thitherto nothing but spiritual splen- 
 dour and ethereal freedom, to become the ally and 
 thrall of the body ^ 
 
 The last of the innumerable analogies, or rather 
 identities, which I shall here notice is the indis- 
 solubility of union, when it has reached its final 
 stage. So long as love in the soul is only in the 
 initial state of light, or assent to and admiration 
 of what is most excellent, the light may be quenched 
 by other lights, less pure and bright, but nearer ; 
 when, again, the light descends into the will, this 
 may not be able to bear the strain of a love that 
 calls for continual fidelity of correspondence ; but 
 when it reaches the sensible affections and has 
 been crowned in mutual and ineffable compla- 
 cencies, there is no longer any practical danger of 
 separation. The Soul feels assured that, above 
 and apart from the great security she enjoys in 
 the fact that all temptation has been cut up at the 
 roots by her possession of a sensible and abiding
 
 170 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 felicity which makes all others insipid, and which 
 enables her to say, with full sincerity, " Whom 
 have I in Heaven but Thee, and what on earth in 
 comparison with Thee," her Lord also has entered 
 into new relations with her, and she is relieved of 
 obligations, while He has assumed them. He 
 wants nothing of her now which she does not 
 delight to give ; whereas He has taken on Him 
 the marital duty of seeing that all temptation 
 which could endanger her is kept at a distance ; 
 He is bound to cherish and comfort, and behave, 
 not with justice, but with tender indulgence to His 
 own flesh ; and, in case of any occasional weakness 
 of obedience on her part, to show Himself the 
 loving Master that she loves Him to be, by 
 compelling her sensitive disinclination to such 
 external duties as may remain. He has now 
 made her " holy " or " separate " to Himself, and 
 " He will not suffer His Holy One to see cor- 
 ruption." His mercies are now " the sure mercies 
 of David," and though she acknowledges that there 
 is still a hypothetical possibility of divorce should 
 she fall, as it is practically incredible that she now 
 can, a possibility that causes her to " rejoice with 
 trembling," yet, 'on the whole, she is "sure that 
 neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principal- 
 ities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things 
 to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 171 
 
 creature," shall be able to separate her from her 
 Love. 
 
 This parallel appears to fail in one point ; I mean, 
 the extreme jealousy on the part of the Divine Lover 
 of the Soul, when once she has entered upon this 
 relationship to Him, and the entire absence of 
 jealousy on her part. Sleep and accidental and 
 external duty do not separate her from Him, but 
 the least waking thought, feeling, word, or act, 
 which has not Him, directly or indirectly, for its 
 object, does. When God makes Himself as wine 
 to the Beloved, like the fabled Bacchus, the one 
 thing He resents is inattention, and when she has 
 fallen into this offence, she has to recover her 
 favour with Him by tears and prayers. She, how- 
 ever, is not only content but delighted to think 
 that there are many whom He loves as well as or 
 better than He loves her. I attribute this fact to 
 her instinctive perception that her beauty is 
 unique ("there is none like her, none"), and that 
 no other can ever be to Him what she is, though 
 millions may be a great deal more. Moreover, 
 by virtue of the supernatural elevation of her 
 intellect in her intimacies with Him, she is enabled 
 to discern that He has the power of absolutely 
 forgetting all others when she is in His presence, 
 and that He is, at such times, wholly hers ; a 
 concrete fact which the philosophers express in
 
 172 DIEU ET MA DAME 
 
 the abstract, when they affirm that " God is a 
 circle whose centre is everywhere and circumfer- 
 ence nowhere." 
 
 Perhaps but I am not sure, for I do not know 
 the mind of women or that of the Saints well 
 enough to judge the parallel also fails in this, 
 that, in the higher relationship, the soul is always 
 more or less troubled by the incredibility of so 
 much bliss and honour, and, in the presence of 
 the only reality of life, a reality as natural as it is 
 spiritual, she perpetually sighs 
 
 ' ' Ah, me, I do not dream, 
 Yet all this does some heathen fable seem ! " 
 
 With these exceptioas, if exceptions they be, 
 there is, indeed, no vital characteristic of a 
 perfectly ordered love in the natural sphere, 
 which has not its likeness and full development 
 in the Divine ; nor can even the natural perfection 
 of love be attained, without habitual reference to 
 the spiritual. Wordsworth says : 
 
 " By grace divine, 
 Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine," 
 
 and a man can only love a woman with full felicity 
 by understanding and obeying Christ's injunction 
 that he should love her as He loves the Church,
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 173 
 
 which every lover of God is in little, "The 
 woman for the man," " the man by the woman," 
 and "God all in all" in both: for Milton's 
 rule, 
 
 " He for God only, she for God in him," 
 
 is not a wholly adequate statement of the relation- 
 ship of man and woman, though it is as near a 
 statement as a Socinian could be expected to 
 arrive at. The woman is " homo " as well as the 
 man, though one element, the male, is suppressed 
 and quiescent in her, as the other, the female, is 
 in him ; and thus he becomes the Priest and 
 representative to her of the original Fatherhood, 
 while she is made to him the Priestess and repre- 
 sentative of that original Beauty which is "the 
 express image and glory of the Father." each 
 being equally, though not alike, a manifestation 
 of the Divine to the other. 
 
 Love, with this commentary on it written in the 
 hearts of lovers, becomes as much brighter, purer, 
 and more ardent than the love which is without 
 it as the electric light is brighter, purer, and more 
 ardent than a torch of tar ; and so far is it from 
 being true, as the foolish might imagine, that 
 something of the natural delight of love must be 
 lost in this its exaltation, that everything which is 
 truly in Nature's order gains immensely by the
 
 I 7 4 DIEU ET MA 
 
 supernatural heat and light which illuminate and 
 purge the exceeding obscurity of the phenomena 
 of the uninformed natural passion. 
 
 Should any believing reader object that such 
 thoughts as I have suggested to him imply an 
 irreverent idea of the intimacies of God with His 
 elect, I beg him to remember that in receiving 
 the Blessed Sacrament with the faith which the 
 Church demands, he affirms and acts a familiarity 
 which is greater than any other that can be 
 conceived. 1 
 
 If any one perseveres in the path of perfection, 
 these points of likeness between Divine and human 
 love will become res cognita et visa; and he will 
 see that the phenomena of the human relationship 
 of love are such because they are the realities of 
 the Divine. For all properly human instincts are 
 no other than the lineaments of God ; and man 
 (homo) is an image and likeness of God, most 
 especially in those mysteries which let all remark 
 well are quite as inscrutable in their secondary, 
 or human, as in their primary manifestation, 
 " the surest foundation of marriage-love being," as 
 Hooker says, " that of which we are least able to 
 render a reason." 
 
 1 For more of these analogies the reader may consult 
 the verses called " De Natura Deorum," in the Unknown 
 Eros.
 
 DIEU ET MA DAME 175 
 
 Let none who have as yet had no experience 
 of these things, though they may have been doing 
 their very best, despair. We must usually feed 
 for many years upon divine things before God 
 gives us the taste of our food ; and even when we 
 have done all, we may not find ourselves among 
 the blessed number of those who are called to the 
 Counsels of Perfection and the fruition of God in 
 this life. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
 
 A 000 833 887