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<h1><i>Religio Journalistici</i></h1>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<h2 class="nobreak">OTHER BOOKS<br/> BY THE SAME AUTHOR</h2></div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Fiction</i></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Parnassus on Wheels</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">The Haunted Bookshop</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Kathleen</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Tales from a Rolltop Desk</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Where the Blue Begins</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Essays</i></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Shandygaff</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Mince Pie</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Pipefuls</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Plum Pudding</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Travels in Philadelphia</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">The Powder of Sympathy</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Inward Ho!</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Religio Journalistici</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Poetry</i></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Songs for a Little House</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">The Rocking Horse</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Hide and Seek</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Chimneysmoke</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Translations from the Chinese</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">Parsons’ Pleasure</span></div>
<div class="indent"><span class="smcap">The Bowling Green</span></div>
</div></div>
</div>
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<div class="titlepage">
<p><span class="xxlarge"><span class="orange"><i>Religio Journalistici</i></span></span></p>
<p><span class="xlarge"><i>By</i><br/>
<i>Christopher Morley</i></span></p>
<div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/title_page_illustration.jpg" alt="" /></div>
<p><i>Garden City</i><span class="gap"> <i>New York</i></span><br/>
<span class="orange"><span class="large"><i>Doubleday, Page & Company</i></span></span><br/>
<i>1924</i></p>
</div>
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<p class="center"><span class="large">
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY<br/>
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY<br/>
<br/>
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</span><br/>
<br/>
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY THE CENTURY CO.<br/>
<br/>
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES<br/>
AT<br/>
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.<br/>
<br/>
<i>First Edition</i></p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<p class="ph1"><i>Religio Journalistici</i></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">RELIGIO JOURNALISTICI</h2></div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall....</div>
<div class="verse">I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,</div>
<div class="verse">Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,</div>
<div class="verse">Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant....</div>
<div class="verse">Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,</div>
<div class="verse">Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
never told them a word.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verseright">—Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>The secret thoughts of a man run over all things
without shame or blame; which verbal discourse
cannot do farther than the judgment shall approve
of the time, place, and persons.—Hobbes’s
“Leviathan.”</p>
</div>
<p> </p>
<p class="drop-cap">I WAS coming home from Buffalo in a
train delightfully called “The Black
Diamond.” I had any number of books
in my bag, but my lower instincts were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>
uppermost: I was tired, and pined for the
narcosis of newspapers. I asked the
porter, also a black diamond, to see if
there were any lying around. He brought
me a great mass of them: Chicago papers,
Buffalo papers, Wilkes-Barre papers.
With great happiness I browsed among
their cheerful simplicities. From Wilkes-Barre
I learned that</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>Shakespeare’s marvellous plays could never
have been written by a dyspeptic. He ate carefully,
sensibly, and had excellent digestion.</p>
</div>
<p>(I had just come back from the dining
car when I read that, and wondered a
little sadly if I had been sensible.)</p>
<p>From Chicago (“The World’s Greatest
Newspaper”) I learned, in an article on
“A Perfume to Suit Your Personality,”
that</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>The vampire had best be sparing in her use of
any odour. An oriental bouquet of jasmine,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
tube rose, cassie, and civet would enhance the
individuality of the colourful type. For a perfume
combination of this sort when used correctly
can create a sensation akin to ecstasy, bringing to
the wearer a feeling of tremendous vitality.</p>
</div>
<p>But in this Chicago paper I found so
much to perpend that I never reached
the journals of other cities. I learned
in an interview with Lady Diana Manners
(“Pressed for Precious Secrets of
Pulchritude, She Reveals a Surprising
Lack of Them”) that</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>The life of a newspaper person is not without
its recompenses—aside from the weekly stipend.
Sometimes it is a hard life—when, say, you scratch
and pound upon the old dome, pleading, begging
its tenant, Mr. Brain, to give up an idea, and you
get in response a loud and hollow echo convincing
you he has left for parts unknown!</p>
</div>
<p>I learned from Chicago that</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>The literary life of New York continues to rattle
on. And it is a rather grand life: though a number
of writers appear to scratch an existence from the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
soil of Greenwich Village and the purlieus of mean
streets, most of the men who write our books live
quite comfortably. One meets them every day—a
prosperous crew—who lunch cosily at the ——
or at the —— and not infrequently the
——, then are whisked homeward in shining
limousines to put in another hour or so on the
manuscript of a new novel.</p>
</div>
<p>A few days later, filled with pensive,
affectionate, and somewhat irreverent
thoughts about the newspaper business,
I went uptown to the offices of a very
great New York paper—a paper which,
as a gatherer of news, though it does not
claim the “Greatest” phrase, comes a lot
nearer to it than that one in Chicago. A
beautiful bronze elevator lifted me gently
to the tenth floor, a beautiful bronze
attendant took my name politely and
asked me to wait until my host emerged
from conference. I gazed amazedly into
the editorial penetralia, churchly in aspect,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
with groined ceiling, panelled alcoves,
like pews, and lead-veined glass.
Very handsome young women came strolling
from those shadowy cloisters of opinion.
A scholarly-looking young man,
with tortoise spectacles, sat under a reredos
of books. If not a curate, at least
a curator. It all came down upon me
with crushing force. How could one
chaff this magnificent thing? How could
one speak jocularly of The Press? This
was all so terribly real, so unmistakably
there. I remembered my amazement
when I first entered the Curtis Building in
Philadelphia. Beside the humble little
state house where a nation was founded
rises that gigantic cube of Americanization;
in more senses than one it is the
exact spiritual centre of America. Does
it not contain a mosaic glass picture with
“over a million pieces”? It has been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
told, with the jolliest humour, how several
of the world’s greatest artists were
commissioned, one after another, to create
a painting of Plato’s Grove of Academe
for that lobby; but they kept on “passing
away” before it was done. There is
something most quaintly American, I believe,
in adoring Plato with a vast painting
rather than by listening to what he
had to say. At a window on the seventh
floor (I think it was the seventh) might
have been seen the strong masculine face
of the fashion editor of the <i>Ladies’ Home
Journal</i> gazing out with a sudden unaccountable
nostalgia. The trademarked
patroness of the “L. H. J.,” I
remembered, was Pallas Athene. Pallas
is right, I said to myself, studying that
building. This <i>must</i> be a home of literature,
the walnut panelling is so fine.
This huge bulk, edified from the ribs of a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
simple, shrewd, courageous, and strangely
wistful little man from Maine—surely if
the Muse were looking for a comfortable
lodging, this is where she would habit?</p>
<p>Sometimes it is with an effort that one
must remind oneself, a thing is not necessarily
wrong because it is so large.</p>
<p>Well, all that came back to me as I sat
waiting in the New York newspaper office.
Painful doubts, too, as to whether what
I am anxious to say is worth attempt.
For it is sure to be misconceived. I am
not satirizing anything. These matters
are far too serious for mere satire, which
is so agreeably easy. No, I am merely
attempting to think.</p>
<p>I remembered also how, not long before,
it strangely befell me to speak in a large
church on a Sunday afternoon. I had
not rightly apprehended the situation beforehand:
I found that I should have to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
mount into what the cheerful minister
called “the high pulpit.” Sitting behind
a thin frondage of palms, and scanning
the scene in some frightfulness, I waited
my exposure. It was a beautiful church,
and there was a large and friendly congregation.
In one of the front pews there
was even a gentleman with a silk hat.
There was music, the thrilling tumult of
the organ, a choir, a soprano soloist with
a clear and lovely voice. There were
prayers, and great words were said. And
in the same way that the editorial magnificence
of that newspaper office came
down upon me from above, so I felt the
whole weight and beauty and tradition
of Holy Church moulding me and subduing
my poor little premeditated ardours.
I felt the awful hopelessness of attempting
to convey, in those circumstances, my
feeble and futile sense of the love and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
liberty of life. I knew then why Christ
preached in the open air. And I knew
that the people in those pews, dear
friendly people the latchets of whose
minds I was not worthy to unloose, desired
me to say what was in my heart just as
keenly as I desired to say it. Yet it
could not, fully, be done. Holy Church
was too strong for them as it was for me.
I knew then, even in the small, imperfect
way I know things, something of the
whole history of religions. I knew how
the majesty and glamour and noble gravity
of institutions and authorities must
have lain heavy on the hearts of schismatics
and reformers. It is not that those
poor brave souls did not love the rote
they questioned. But the rote must be
kept in its place. I knew then, for the
first time, the real dangers of the pulpit.
And yet even that polished wood was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
once alive, growing from earth toward
sky.</p>
<h2 class="nobreak">§2</h2></div>
<p>The world of newspapers and the life of
newspaper men are for the most part vulgar,
and therefore delightful. I mean
vulgar in its exact sense: it is a word
neither of praise nor blame, both of which
are foreign to philosophy. O thrilling,
delicious, childish world! The other day,
from a green glade in the country, I telephoned
to a newspaper office. “City
room, please,” I said. The connection
was made, and as the receiver was taken
down, I could hear that old adorable hum,
the quick patter of typewriters, voices on
the copy desk tersely discussing the ingenious
minutiæ of the job. No man
who has dabbled, ever so amateurishly, in
that spirited child’s-play outgrows its irrational
and cursèd charm. Over miles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
of telephone wire that drugging hum
came back to my ear, that furious and bewildering
pulse of excitement which seems
so frantically important and really means
so little. O world so happy, so amusing,
so generously emotional, so exempt from
the penalty of thought! World that deals
with quaintly codified and abstracted notions
of life! How idle to ask whether
newspapers tell the truth! With truth
they have little concern. Their trade is
in facts; like all prosperous tradesmen
they are reasonably conscientious. To
belittle newspapers for not telling the
truth is as silly as to regard them as
training-ground for literature. Literature
and journalism rarely overlap.</p>
<p>For the newspaper world, that vast,
brightly coloured, contentious, and phantasmagoric
picture of life that it evolves
for its readers, is mostly a spurious world<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
evolved for hurried and ignorant people.
It is a world so happily out of touch with
the world of philosophy that when, on
rare occasions, the newspapers get wind
of the things that philosophers habitually
and calmly discuss, it causes a terrible to-do
in the headlines. The world of newspaper
thinking is almost the last resort
of the truly childish in heart. With
princely accuracy is it called “the newspaper
game.” Children are not friendly
to philosophy, nor hostile. They are
simply not aware it exists.</p>
<p>And the game of newspapers, which
I greatly love, being at heart no philosopher,
is enormously important. The prevailing
temperament of its players is
worth careful study. The mere existence
of newspapers is a proof of the religious
instinct among men, that passionate interest
in one another which implies that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
we are all gossips together. Gossips are
people who have only one relative in
common, but that relative the highest
possible; namely, God. There is truly
some strange analogy between church and
press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s
taste for making itself clerical in
architecture, or the successful church’s
appetite for front-page controversy;
whether it is that they both make the
cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed;
whether it is that the newspaper
carries on the medieval church’s lust of
persecution; or that they both mobilize
for war sooner than any one else; or that
both are vehicles of great realities, but
vehicles so gorgeously mechanized and
ritualed that the passenger has almost
been forgotten—whatever the basis of the
analogy may be, I am not sure; but I feel
it to be there.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>Journalism, like every skilled <i>métier</i>,
tends to become a sort of priesthood.
All such professional groups admit with
cynical or humorous readiness, inside the
circle, truths that it is unmannerly to
gossip abroad. But now and then some
happy member feels he has absorbed
enough hokum to last him for a reasonable
lifetime. He has enjoyed, perhaps even
profited by, the sharp childishness of that
way of life. He escapes for a time, with
aspiration to think it over. He wearies
of the tragic ingenuity of men at concealing
their real thoughts. There are no
longer any codes of manners to be considered,
any possibly tender readers to be
sheltered, any powerful patrons to be
placated. Of course genuinely detached
thinking, even if it were possible, is likely
to be discouraged; for detachment is
always assumed to be malignant. But,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
anyhow, let’s be at least like so many
houses in the suburbs, semi-detached.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a sort of spring fever of the
soul, a seizure when, in moments of golden
tranquil intuition, we see Lucretius’s
“coasts of light.” We would hope to
savour, as he bids us, not merely the
honey that is greased round the rim of
the cup—the honey of our daily amusement
and distraction—but even the chill
purging wormwood of the draft. Suddenly
the quotidian employ, the haggling
scruples of detail, seem strangely insignificant.
Languor and lassitude and uneasy
hankering pervade the spirit—an
intimation of unearthliness. There is
passion to go seeking “those things that
are requisite and necessary.” In Walt’s
noble phrase, “to sign for soul and body.”
Then, unashamed of the hunger and
trouble of human spirits, it seems irrelevant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
either to chaff or to praise the dear
farce of life. One dreams of uttering only
some small granule of broken truth, something
more than the jocund trickery of the
press.</p>
<p>Every philosopher is a humorist who
has been squeezed. And the newspaper
man, odd as this may sound, is not the
least appropriate student to pursue the
wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is
kinspirit of the parson in this, that church
and press are perhaps the two professions
that have most frankly regarded themselves
as separate estates, above and
apart from the common man. The priest
esteems himself the vicar of God. The
pressman appoints himself vicar of News.
The priest transmits to the congregation
as much of God’s doings as he thinks will
be not too embarrassing for them to hear.
And the newspaper man lays bare that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
portion of the event which he considers
the public will be most anxious to pay for.
Both are anthologists.</p>
<p>For some time I had been saving clippings
of newspaper stories about recent
religious controversy. I meant to sit
down some evening and read them
through, patiently, to see how much humane
sense I could winnow. But I found
I could not force my eyes through them.
For the sake of record, to notify the
quaintness of mankind, I copied down a
few of the headlines. “<span class="smcap">Christ Held
Divine or Illegitimate</span>: Dr. Pettingill
Makes Baptists Gasp by Strong Defense
of Virgin Birth.” (New York <i>World</i>.)
<span class="smcap">Dr. Guthrie Finds Yule All Pagan</span>:
St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom Was
Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic.
(New York <i>Times</i>.) <span class="smcap">Modernism
Found Here Mid Rituals, Dogma Mid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
Glare</span>. (New York <i>Evening Post</i>.) <span class="smcap">Dr.
Guthrie Scents Clashes to Come.</span>
(New York <i>Times</i>.) And so on. I threw
the mass of clippings into the fire.</p>
<p>And yet throughout those naïve burblings
the reader felt a strange mixture of
exhilaration and disgust. For the newspapers,
with their unerring instinct, realize
that men are keenly and desperately
interested in these matters. Hidden inside
that mysterious carcass, your neighbour,
is the universal cry, “I want to be
happy!” And with all their agile and
cautious skill at hiding what they really
think, men wildly crave those liberating
sorceries (liquor and love and laughter,
perhaps even literature, too) that roll
away the stone from the door of the
heart.</p>
<p>Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks
about religion except for the pleasure of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse.
For the less we talk about religion,
probably, the nearer we come to the
heart of it. By religion we mean, I suppose,
our ligatures with an unseen world—a
world not realized, as Wordsworth
says in those “Intimations” that are a
whole prayer-book in themselves. There
are “high instincts,” he tells us, before
which we tremble “like a guilty thing
surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we
know ourselves to have been so wearily
and perversely disloyal to that unseen
world of beauty and ecstasy; and our
surprise, that when we escape into the
honest solitudes of the mind we find it
waiting for us. There is a great saying
to the effect that wherever two or three
are gathered together, I shall be among
you. But, alas! it is even more true
perhaps (one must not forget a plenty of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
perhapses) that wherever two or three
are gathered together, there I am <i>not</i>.
Human meeting introduces awkwardly
human difficulties and embarrassments.
It introduces, for instance, vanity and
humility, both awkward encumbrances
to truth. Is there a man who does not
know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better
company” when he is alone? As old
Doctor Donne found in the absence of his
mistress, there is a “close corner of the
brain” where the purest and loveliest
embraces are possible. Of all mistresses,
the fairest and the farthest away is Truth.
God is known, if at all, in solitude.</p>
<h2 class="nobreak">§3</h2></div>
<p>The theological bickerings of our time
and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes
would say, are due perhaps to the uneven
progress of a great shift in the human<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
notion of God. The primitive imagination
of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent
and omnipresent personality.
Then, later, men come to think of God as
a kind of force or law, or a harmony
among infinite laws and forces. This
process of magnifying God from a person
to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly,
as do all ideas. And there is no
squabbling so violent as that between
people who accepted an idea yesterday
and those who will accept the same idea
to-morrow. More important than the
novelty of ideas is the differential in the
rate at which people accept them. Or it
might even be put the other way round—the
rate at which ideas accept people as
vehicles. An idea often hops into a
person and uses him, more or less as we
hop into taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked,
not unwisely, that his “Irrational<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
Knot” was a first try (on the
part of “the Life Force”) to get the
theme of “A Doll’s House” written in
English.</p>
<p>Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely
a calculus of personal benefit. When he
found that the seeds he threw away had
sprouted and come up, he suddenly remembered
the goodness of God. But
gradually men tend to rise sufficiently
above their own pangs and pleasures to
relish the conception of a vaster God—a
God who does not even know that we
exist. There are still, astounding as it
seems, actual and living parsons who tell
us that the Museum of Natural History
is an affront to the Deity. Their simplicity
is as delightful as that of Edmund
Gosse’s father (if you remember that
great book, “Father and Son”). The
rock that his reason split upon was the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
problem whether Adam and Eve, created
<i>de novo</i>, had navels. There are others
who find in the spider webs and redwood
rings of the museum a powerful impulse
to wonder and praise. At any rate, this
process of magnifying God from an invisible
bishop of friable temper to a universal
phantom of legality is what Thomas
Hardy had in mind when he urged “the
abandonment of the masculine pronoun
in allusions to the Fundamental Energy.”
Nor, on consideration, do we find the
masculine pronoun a symbol of such
benevolent majesty that it need much
longer be retained as spokesman for Deity.
It is necessary for man to know, as astronomers
do, the inconceivable minuteness
of himself and his affairs.</p>
<p>Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is
equally urgent for man to act as though
his business were momentous. For the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
whole intellectual life is based upon paradox
and dainty artifice. And here we
encounter some fundamental characteristics
of human behaviour which are
highly interesting.</p>
<p>First of all, man is orderly. Finding
himself in a grotesquely complicated universe,
he hastily tries to reduce what he
sees to some general principles. He concocts
helpful formulæ, rules of thumb,
mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs,
to simplify matters. There has been a
rather absurd eagerness on the part of
the newspapers to reproach the church
for its adherence to formalism. But man
is a formula-bearing animal. And I
doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever
lived was more at the mercy of ritual and
formulated ways of expression than the
average city editor. An incident may
be as interesting as you please, but unless<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
it fits into his carefully ratiocinated
scheme of what constitutes a “story”
and how it should be “played,” it gets
little attention. I have mentioned the
Museum of Natural History; let’s take
it again as an illustration. I took there
a small girl four years old. At first she
was appalled and horrified by the things
she saw. Live animals, at the zoo, she
was familiar with. But these so genuine-looking
and yet motionless creatures,
plausible enough in their synthetic facsimile
surroundings, yet with a gruesome
air of not-quite-rightness—she was badly
puzzled. They fitted into no preconceived
frame in her small mind.</p>
<p>“Are they real, Daddy?” she inquired.</p>
<p>“They were once real, and now are
stuffed,” I said.</p>
<p>Her eager mind leaped at this. Here
was a happy little formula. And at every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or
a puma or a walrus or a whale, with
monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it
real and stuffed?” To which I replied,
each time, with patient repetition, “Yes,
real and stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly
until we came to the figures of
Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula
had to be devised, that they were
“Not real, but made to look like it.”
These trifling statements made the museum,
for her, a rational and not too
terrifying place.</p>
<p>Once in a while, if you are fond of
self-scrutiny, you will catch yourself in
the very act of creating or parroting some
useful formula. Formulæ swarm in the
mind just as birds do in an orchard. And
though they destroy some fruit, they also
help to exterminate lesser vermin which
might do much harm. For the most part<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
we are all mercifully unaware of our dependence
on them.</p>
<p>Secondly, then, once formulæ are made,
another subtle trick of the mind enters
into function. Man’s sovereign faculty
of pretense works upon them. He persuades
himself that these little rites
and short-cuts are not really made by
himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s
capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been
the only thing that has kept him going
in a rough, bruising world. He has
found, throughout history, that the percolation
of certain fictions into affairs
made order and government more easy.
Indeed the number of generally accepted
fictions in currency is not such a bad test
of civilization: the more such harmless
pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The
divine right of kings was one great fiction
that had a long serial career and gradually<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
tapered off. Oliver Cromwell
“Garred kings ken they had a lith in their
necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem
to have suggested the same thing. That
adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes,
whose wise and racy survey of human
foibles might almost have made any subsequent
palaver unnecessary, had people
patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays,
is copious in instance of men’s love of
standing “in awe of their own imaginations.”
We are all quick to believe anything,
he remarks, from teachers who can
“with gentleness and dexterity take hold
of our fear and ignorance.” Whereas any
truth, no matter how rationally arrived
at, that counters our passion and interest,
we naturally reject. “I doubt not but,”
says the darling old cynic, “if it had been
a thing contrary to any man’s right of
dominion that the three angles of a triangle<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
should be equal to two angles of a
square, that doctrine should have been,
if not disputed, yet by the burning of all
books of geometry, suppressed.”</p>
<p>Master Hobbes is very jolly, too, on a
matter that has interested every thoughtful
observer since civilization began—that
religion is always heartily favoured by
prosperous people. Obviously; for it is
a stabilizing force. I was greatly struck,
approaching Pittsburgh on the train,
passing through a black, cindered region
where life must lack many of its most
harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding
number of churches. These, surely,
are not there without some sound social
reason. There are three prime consolations
known to man in the difficulty of
his life, God, love, and money. Of any
two of these you may deprive him without
hearing much grumble, provided he has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
plenty of the third. But if he lacks all
three, there is sure to be trouble.</p>
<p>I have often noticed, in burning a pile
of dead leaves, that the mass that seems
burned through will, if turned over with
the rake, burst into fresh flame. Down
under the mound, smothered by weight
and closeness, were many fragments that
needed only air and freedom to burst into
golden blaze. Perhaps it is so with any
industrial society. To turn it top to
bottom now and then would liberate
brilliant human combustions that now
lie choked. It is a dangerous doctrine,
but so are all doctrines that are any fun.
It is a thoroughly Christian doctrine, too.</p>
<p>Before we leave the topic of human
relish in pretense, let’s mention one very
innocent and amusing example. One of
the gay hilarities of existence is the way
the current social pretenses shift and vary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
and move in recurring orbits. The négligé
of one period becomes the <i>haut ton</i>
of the next. A few years ago, during a
very severe winter, it became the mode
for young women to go trapesing about
in galoshes which were left floppingly unbuckled.
What, then, do we see? A
year or so later galoshes are put on the
market, very cunningly devised with
drooping webbed tops to <i>look</i> as though
they were carelessly left undone. These
at once became, particularly in rustic high
schools, excellently <i>de rigueur</i>. It was a
daintily accurate exposition of our human
taste for illusion.</p>
<p>And the third fundamental characteristic
that I am thinking of is our universal
liability to habit. This is too familiar for
comment. Take merely one instance
which has pleasing analogies. Suppose
you go to a small haberdasher to buy a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
pair of socks. In payment, you give
him a five-dollar gold piece. As he
makes change, he is obscurely troubled.
He will ask if you haven’t a bill instead.
He doesn’t relish that coin, because he
isn’t used to it. Yet, if I understand
correctly, gold is the only genuine money
there is; all the other stuff is merely
money by convention. And how beautifully
valid in regard to truth as well.
Half-truths to which men are accustomed
are so much easier to pass than the golden
mintage they rarely encounter! What
was it Mr. Don Marquis has remarked:
“If you make people think they think,
they’ll love you. If you really make
them think, they’ll hate you.”</p>
<h2 class="nobreak">§4</h2></div>
<p>Certainly these three coercive factors,
and many others, too, bear strangely upon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
all our attempts to think. The beauty
and the happiness of religion, perhaps, lie
in the fact that it has little to do with
thinking. As far as any man knows, up
to now, the universe is insoluble; and the
mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility.
It resents the solemn circling
of the Dipper, seen from the front porch
every clear night. Filling itself with slow
darkness, gently tilting and draining
again, it too cruelly reminds us of the
orderly immensities of space. And religion
may very well be considered a form
of art and of anesthetic to soften the
onset of that insolvency. It is reason’s
petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the
memory of that insolence.” If it makes
us happy, we need inquire no further; for
happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps,
indeed, we are but memoranda in the
note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
of some story that flashed into His mind
one day, but which He did not trouble
to write. So we are hunting, hunting
endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or
we are surf-bathers in an ocean where
one step carries us beyond our depth.
Accept any figure of speech that appeals
to you. No work of art or literature yet,
so far as I know, has given an adequate
presentment of the glory and agony and
mirth and excitement of being alive.
Suppose some visitor from another planet
dropped in for an evening and could
communicate his inquisition. We wanted
to give him just one book that would offer
a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable,
of the life we have known—man’s
long campaign with nature, with other
men, with woman, with himself. Some
suggest “Candide,” but I find that great
book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
Medici,” but is it not too witty?
We might, in a hasty ransack of the
shelves, linger momently upon Boswell or
Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets
or “Moby Dick”; or upon the Book of
Common Prayer or a photograph of
Gozzoli’s “Viaggio dei Re Magi.” But
not even these would duly serve. It would
have to be an anthology, I fear; perhaps
Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though
it should really have a stouter infusion
of the seventeenth century, when God-intoxicated
and Eros-maddened poets
like John Donne and Andrew Marvell
uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous
despair.</p>
<p>And that brings us to another cusp in
this only too risible indent upon the infinite.
Religion is an attempt, a noble
attempt, to suggest in human terms
more-than-human realities. The seat of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
Peter has always lain beyond the Alps.
The church, like the poet, is an ambassador
from abroad; from the strangest of
countries, that lying within our own
bosoms. And what is the virtue of an
ambassador? Surely, tact. The one
thing that makes ambassadors useless or
dangerous is too great a zest to blurt out
truths that many of us know, but have
agreed not to emphasize. He thinks in
the language of his homeland; he must
speak—though always, we trust, with
winningly foreign accent—the tongue to
which he is accredited. The ambassador
knows, better than any other, that truth
is condiment, not diet. It is rough manners
to shove truth at people when they
are not expecting it. There is always
charming significance in popular phrases.
“The dreadful truth” is such a one.
Truth is always dreaded, not so much because<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
it is gruesome or tragic, but because
it is so often absurd.</p>
<p>The church, then, comes before us as
envoy from the world of spirit to the
world of flesh; and here is the anomaly,
that only too probably these worlds have
small interest in common. So is our envoy
but demi-potentiary. In medieval
time the problem was simple; flesh and
spirit were assumed to be deadly enemies
one of the other. But nowadays we lean
toward a casuistry far more perplexed;
that body is soul’s noblest ally, that whatever
makes flesh satiate and merry is so
much gain for soul. Blithe, ruddy doctrine!
Yet, sadly enough, it is even
possible that truth is neither Trojan nor
avoirdupois. Flesh and spirit sometimes
look terribly incommensurable. Saint
Paul did not fully plumb the real tragedy
of the situation. The most bitter wisdom<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
of the human voice is the very opposite of
Paul’s cry. Transpose it so: <i>Video deteriora
proboque, meliora sequor.</i></p>
<p>Body and soul, tied together back to
back, see different realms of sky. And
the innermost capsule of mind, that very
I of very I, though wretchedly at the
mercy of pains and lusts, is yet also oddly
detached. Sitting in the dentist’s chair,
the innermost self says: “Here we are.
This is terrible. Now he is going to hurt
me. Is it the essential me he is going to
hurt, or is it just the make-believe me?”
But when the pang comes, then truly for
an instant all me’s whatsoever coalesce
into one indignant craven whole. Yet
even in that horrid shudder I think we
are obscurely aware that it is not our
essence that surrenders. That volatile
quiddity has retreated in disgust, loath to
attend the deplorable scene. He is as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
cheerfully regardless of body as is the
tenant of a house he has merely rented,
and for rather less than value. He is,
perhaps, not unlike the fire on the hearth,
the brightness and warm centre of the
home, yet caring nought for your cherished
odds and ends. What’s Hecuba to
him? Given a chance, that same domestic
ember would devour the whole building;
and is no different, in essence, from
the roaring streamers that once ran wild
in Baltimore and San Francisco.</p>
<p>I knew a lovely and thoughtful woman
who, with a few other adepts, used to do
graceful figure-skating on the far side of a
college skating-pond. There, in a quiet
little cove of clear ice, apart from the
crowd and the rhythmic, hollow undersong
of the whole vibrating lake, this little
group swung and twirled. I can see her
small slender figure, her bright cheek, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
lovely float and spread of her skirt as she
curved and poised in that steely waltzing.
College students and wild hockey berserks
and miscellaneous small fry scuttled and
careered about; now and then a rubber
puck would skim across the ice, and like
a pack of hounds the barbarian rout would
sweep upon that tranquil shore of the
pond. For a moment the pensive skaters
would be blotted out by swirling movement—clattering
sticks, ringing skates,
noisy shouts. Then the rabble would
whirl away. The fancy skaters would be
seen again; and that lonely figure, swinging,
leaning in airy curves, aware of it all
with thoughtful eyes a little sparked with
annoyance, aloof from the turmoil, yet
not unkindly so.</p>
<p>Not otherwise, perhaps, our hidden capsule
of identity is a solitary skater. The
wild rush of emotions, desires, passions,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
timidities, comes tearing across the pond;
lonely Diana is hidden, even shouldered
off her lagoon of clear crystal. But then
they go racketing away. The pirouette
begins again, and the soul is happy with
her own concerns.</p>
<p>What language, then, is our ambassador
to utter, dealing with two worlds appallingly
incongruous? Is it strange if, like
the rest of us, he falls back upon prudential
and cheery approximations? That
witty writer Stella Benson mentions in
one of her novels (“The Poor Man”) a
character who “knew too well the difficulties
and dangers of being alive to despise
those who sought for safety in tremulous
platitudes.”</p>
<h2 class="nobreak">§5</h2></div>
<p>Speaking of ambassadors there was one
in the sixteenth century who told the
following story:</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>At Constantinople I saw an Old Man, who,
after he had taken a Cup of Wine in his Hand to
Drink, us’d first to make a hideous Noise; I asked
his Friends, Why he did so? They answered me,
that, by this Outcry, he did, as it were, warn his
Soul to retire to some secret Corner of his Body,
or else, wholly to Emigrate, and pass out of it,
that it might not be guilty of that Sin which he
was about to Commit, nor be defiled with the
Wine that he was about to guzzle down.</p>
</div>
<p>This humorous ancient was not unlike
the modern newspaper man. The hideous
noise of the press, its conscience-annulling
haste, its sense of power and
almost uncontradictable certainty,<SPAN name="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</SPAN> are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
what he employs to warn his soul, his
reason, not to look over his shoulder while
he is at work. The fact is that the whole
ingenious mechanism of a newspaper is so
automatically conjointed and revolves so
rapidly that by sheer fury and speed of
movement it takes on a kind of synthetic
life of its own. It could well be imagined
thundering round and round of its own
accord in a great jovial, shouting stupor.
A leading editorial, tearing passions to
tatters, could arise by spontaneous combustion,
exhaling itself somehow from the
general uproar and joy. Virgin birth
would be no miracle in a newspaper office:
I have seen, and myself committed, editorial
matter whose parent had never been
approached by any siring intelligence.</p>
<p>Or, in the case of the reporter, painfully
trained in a generous human skepticism,
enforced student of the way people behave<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
and the way things happen, alert to discern
the overtones of irony and pathos in
the event, you might expect him to be
the least credulous of beings. If so, the
general flavour of the press little represents
him. He acquiesces, consciously or
unconsciously, in the fact that in all
but a few really intelligent journals the
news columns are edited down to the level
of the proprietor’s intelligence, or what
the active managers imagine to be the
proprietor’s taste. Not in facts, but in
the tone adopted in setting out those facts.
An Index Expurgatorius is issued for office
guidance, lists made of words and phrases
not to be mentioned in news stories. The
more essentially vulgar a paper is, the
more cautious it will be not to use words
the managing editor believes dirty. “Obscene,”
for example, is deleted, and the
truly disgusting word “spicy” is substituted.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
And the reporter himself having
acquiesced, it is not unnatural that the
readers of the paper do also. The great
majority of them, tippling their customary
sheet day after day with the regularity
of dram-fiends, are so indurated to the
grotesque psychology of the more popular
news columns that to find a paper
habitually speaking recognizable moderate
sense would afflict them with a warmth
of indecency and dismay. The daily
journals give them the same pleasure that
the serial parts of Dickens’s novels gave
the early Victorians eighty and ninety
years ago. So we have the agreeable
paradox that these papers we see all
round us, roaring their naïvetés and scandals,
are written and compiled by those
who are, as individuals, studious, serene,
and gently acetic skeptics.</p>
<p>It is an entertaining thought. If it is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
true, I believe it is due to what I think of
as the carburetor-adjustment of the human
mind, a delicate, unconscious, and
continuous process. It pleases me to
imagine that in the intellect there is a
valve that regulates the mixture of truth
and convention that we utter, just as
gasolene and heated air are mixed and
vaporized in the carburetor of an engine.
Whenever we meet any one, or at any rate
any stranger, we are likely to be on our
guard. We have our own little private
reservoir of sincerity, but we don’t intend
to draw on it too largely until we know
we are safe. There are some people, as
you must have noticed, to whom it is
almost impossible to say a word of what
you really believe. Accordingly, automatically
and almost unconsciously, we
make a mental adjustment of our “mixture.”
We admit into it just as much<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
truth as we believe the other is likely to
relish, or willing to receive. But we may
have made a bad guess. The conversation
begins to back-fire. That means the
mixture is too “lean.” Very well; pull
out the choke, enrich it with more candour,
all goes delightfully. Too “rich” a mixture,
however, is, every mechanician
knows, as bad as too “lean.” The mind
gets crusted with carbon—unassimilated
truth. The analogy seems to me highly
applicable, even down to the infusion of
what used to be called, in a bygone slang,
“hot air.” Through this needle-valve,
for the most part unconsciously, we regulate
our mental ignition.</p>
<p>All this, as you shall see presently, has
its just bearing on our topic of religion.
We need, but are little likely to get, a new
“Areopagitica” to liberate our press from
its cheery bondage of vulgarity and slip-slop<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
thinking. The newspaper man who
has pride in his honourable tradition may
well feel grim to see the things he has
sweat for trafficked across counters like
bundles of merchandise; yes, and to see
the transaction applauded by eminent
statesmen and divines who feel the need
of a front-page quote. A little pride is
desirable now and then; yes, in God’s
name, a little pride, gentlemen. We who
have lived, as best we could, for the decency
of letters; who have vigiled with
Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes
and changed opinion with Doctor Johnson,
are we to be hired to and fro by the
genial hucksters who know the art of
print chiefly as a rapid factory for gaily
tinted palaver?</p>
<p>In his tight place, beset by doubts just
as acute as those of the young theologian,
our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
quaint processes of mind. He broods on
the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible
nature of most mortal opinion. He
studies the relativity of truth and the
proliferation of rumour. He notes how
every event is like a stone cast into a
pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations,
widening loops of hearsay. Varying layers
or rings of truth are available for
different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers.
How well he knows the queer
fact that you can say, unrebuked, in a
weekly what would never pass in a daily!
You can say still more in a monthly; in
a quarterly review almost all the beans
can be decanted. And in a book, quite
often you can print your surmises in full.
Of course, to tell exactly what happens,
as Pepys did, it is best to be dead. (How
odd is the saying, “Dead men tell no
tales.” Why, they tell the best tales of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
all.) It does sometimes seem as though
the more immediate readers there are for
any bit of print, the less candour can be
rationed out for each.<SPAN name="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</SPAN></p>
<p>So every human being stands at the
centre of a little eddy or whirl of testimony.
If one could make a map or editor’s
projection of him considered as a
news item—it would be as complicated
as an ocean chart with festoons of barographs
and isotherms, curves and twists
and arrows indicating set of currents, prevailing
winds, soundings. On such a
chart, we would denote here a cyclone of
scandal, there a hot monsoon of misappreciation,
yonder a steady trade-wind<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
of generous sympathy. In an ocean so
various we should find our victim leading
a thousand different phantom lives in the
opinion of others. If you begin to think
about this sort of thing, the asylum
waits; for truly, confronted by the alternating
delights and possibilities of life,
the mind is not unlike that chameleon
that went mad when tethered on a Paisley
shawl.</p>
<p>The newspaper man, then, begins to
feel perhaps that it is necessary for him
to undertake the burden of fidelity to
human realities—that burden that is
often so lightly shrugged off by bishops.
Looking at things in the large, or trying
to, he strongly suspects that formal religion,
as we have known it, is dying;
lovelier and greater poetries are pushing
in. (There are thousands of years still to
come, you know.) The highest honour that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
he can pay to sacred matters is to regard
them as so thrillingly actual that they
can be accepted into the great general
body of human life. To regard them,
indeed, as news, as the word Gospel itself
suggests. It would seem fairly obvious
that the miracles and parables of the
New Testament, like the various creeds
themselves, were intended as vivid and
stunning apologues. To batter them
down to the level of facts seems to degrade
them, as it would be degrading to
reject Keats’s sonnet because there are
no peaks in the isthmus of Darien, and
because it wasn’t Cortes. The newspaper
man prefers to take his stand with Tolstoy,
who said, in that thrilling book “A
Confession”: “I wish to understand in
such a way that everything that is inexplicable
shall present itself to me as
<i>necessarily</i> inexplicable.” He prefers that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
when there is an available and mortally
recognizable way of understanding things,
they should so be understood. Take, for
example, the story of the miracle at
Cana. To a man trained to observe the
delightful ways in which testimony arises
and is transmitted, how does that story
explain itself? Here is a wedding party,
at which appears the amazing stranger.
He seems a man more fascinating, more
charming, more utterly delightful, than
any that those country folk have ever
encountered. They are all very merry,
the toasts go round, the wine runs short.
But the ruler of the feast, turning to the
stranger, says, prettily enough, I think,
“With <i>you</i> here, water is as good as
wine.” Some one else takes it up, echoing
the sentiment, seeking to add to it.
“Right!” he cries. “Our friend here
makes the water into wine. Here’s to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
you!” And with friendly applause the
gathering ratifies the compliment. One
of the servants overhears, and carries the
incident into the kitchen. How quickly
it grows and passes down the village
street! “They’ve got some one in there
who’s turning water into wine!” Can it
be denied that this is the way that human
events are reported?</p>
<p>Let us take an example of a miracle-germ
in our own time. When Horace
Traubel, faithful and simple-minded disciple
of Walt Whitman, died in September,
1919, his body was taken to the
Community Church, at Park Avenue and
Thirty-fourth Street, New York, for the
funeral service. But when the body
reached the church, the little company of
mourners could not enter; the building
had suddenly caught fire. Imagine this
episode handed down through generations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
of simple people by word of mouth. The
intimate disciple of a great poet, both
of them impatient of the genteel religions,
is borne dead to a sacred edifice. It
bursts into flame. Would that not be
taken as some authentic Pentecost, and
at the very least as a proof of Walt’s divinity?
Yet we know well enough that
the event was no miracle, but rather
what Hobbes called “an extraordinary
felicity.”</p>
<p>There is one more Biblical passage I
should like to refer to, one that has often
been considered a knotty saying. It is
the parable of the talents and the unprofitable
servant. I like to conceive
Deity in the guise of that hard master
who wanted his own with usury. “Well,”
I can imagine God saying to the newly
dead, “what did you think of that world
I gave you?” “Not so bad, on the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
whole,” replies the embarrassed soul.
“What!” cries God. “Simpleton, do
you mean to say you took it as you found
it, accepted it, swallowed it down without
question? Depart from me, unprofitable
servant! You were supposed to remould
it nearer to your heart’s desire, to create
out of my materials a new world of your
own.”</p>
<p>Old Doctor Jewett said to Margot
Asquith, “You must believe in God in
spite of what the clergy say.” And truly
I don’t think that any man who has
worked in downtown New York can be
much of an atheist. In that great jungle
of violent life, under the glittering spires
of such steep cathedrals, he must inevitably
be a trifle mad. Even Manhattan,
supposed to be most material of cities, is
best known for the fantastic figure she cuts
against the sky. The loveliest picture I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
ever saw of her profile was a photograph
given me by an amateur lensman who
caught it by accident. It shows that
uneven scarp of buildings in soft masses
of dark and shadow, looming on a queerly
pebbled and fuscous twilight, like an
eclipse. And this, as my astonished
friend learned from his film-dealer, was
an accident, due to mildew on the gelatin.
So some of the most lovely visions of
reality are printed on minds that are mildewed.
The madman and the nincompoop
often see more beauty than the
sane and solid cit. The only possible
suggestion that one might humbly venture
to offer to the authoritative officers of
Holy Church is that they are too sane
and too businesslike. They ask us to
believe not things that are too hard, but
too easy. They are too eager to lock the
stable door after the Messiah has been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
stolen. They have learned the tricks of
our world of flesh so glibly that they seem
sometimes to forget the manners of that
world of spirit they are commissioned to
represent.</p>
<p>For the world is fascinating and painful
beyond human power of testimony. The
best of every life is unprintable. If one
were given five minutes’ warning before
sudden death, five minutes to say what
it had all meant to us, every telephone-booth
would be occupied by people trying
to call up other people to stammer that
they loved them. You would want to
tell a whole lot of people that you love
them, but had been too clumsy and too
shy to admit it. And the newspaper man
himself, who both loves and hates his
queer trade, would be the first to remember
that one always is severest with what
one adores. Every movement is set in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
some strange turning of wonder. As a
man will suddenly discover in himself
some miserable petty trick of behaviour
which, he painfully realizes, is a true
microcosm and characteristic of his life
as a whole, so now and then with the
world at large. We are aware of lights
and shadows and moments of millennium
that seem a part of some vast consistency.
You know the thrill of a letter or parcel
that comes from some one you are fond
of, far away. As you undo the string,
you say, foolishly, but with a genuine
quaver of sentiment, “When that was
tied up, So-and-so handled it!” Well,
there are instants of preposterous happiness,
clear insight, that are just like that—little
packages of reality, tied up in the
twine of our time sense, that come to us
direct, intact, from the eternity and infinity
we call God. It matters little how<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
you explain that great word to yourself.
Perhaps you mean by it the sum total of
all human awarenesses of beauty. In
that sense of prevailing loveliness we are
all obscurely united. In those moments,
moments of heavenly farce and unredeemable
tragedy, we can forgive ourselves
for being only human.</p>
<p>But in these matters silence is the final
eloquence. One does not argue with
moonlight. Men talk of “finding God,”
but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden
in that darkest of hiding-places, your own
heart. You yourself are a part of Him.
The chief danger is to be too prosaic.
Any one who has ever done proof-reading
knows the delicious fidelity and strict zeal
and maddening literalness with which the
professional corrector marks a galley-proof.
How he construes the text according
to his own rote and rigid scheme; how<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
he resents any unusual use of words; how
he is so busy querying things that look
odd to him that he misses many of the
downright errors. That is precisely the
attitude of man toward the universe,
which he is so daringly anxious to interpret
in some comforting sense. The
journalist, whatever his sins and stupidities,
would hope to enjoy the text of life
in the spirit of a collaborating author
rather than presume to correct it. And
he will not do any great poet, such as
Christ, the dishonour of taking him too
literally.</p>
<p>We cannot hope until we have learned
to despair. Let me remind you of some
great lines by Andrew Marvell:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">My love is of a birth as rare</div>
<div class="indent">As ’tis for object strange and high:</div>
<div class="verse">It was begotten by Despair</div>
<div class="indent">Upon Impossibility.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
<div class="verse">As lines, so loves oblique, may well</div>
<div class="indent">Themselves in every angle greet:</div>
<div class="verse">But ours, so truly parallel,</div>
<div class="indent">Though infinite, can never meet.</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class="center">THE END</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<p class="ph2">FOOTNOTES:</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[A]</SPAN> Mr. C. E. Montague writes as follows of the origin of his
novel <i>A Hind Let Loose</i>, a witty satire of newspaper life: “It
arose from much study—in the course of my daily work—of
the editorial articles of the best-reputed English papers. I
found that they consisted, to a wonderfully large percentage,
of certain stock expressions of positiveness, dislike and contempt.
These, I noticed, were so general that they constantly
recurred in all sorts of discussions on various subjects, and the
fancy took me that their use could be carried further and
further until all reference to any particular topic vanished
and nothing but quite general positiveness remained, the
Olympian mentality and temper just going on asserting themselves
for assertion’s sake.”</p>
</div>
<div class="footnote">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[B]</SPAN> There is a very able book called <i>The Gospel According to
Judas</i>, written by a professor at a Western college, which has
circulated in MS. among publishers for ten years, without
yet finding one who is willing to take a chance on its very remarkable
wit and uniquely original conception of the New
Testament story. I have often wondered whether it will ever
get printed.</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="transnote">
<p class="ph2">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
<p>Obvious typographical errors have been standardized.</p>
<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
</div>
</div>
<SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN>
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