Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 910
ONCE upon a time when Mr. H. G. Wells was setting forth on his varied and splendid voyage from Utopia to Utopia, he announced as a sort of watchword or war-cry that the new world would have nothing to do with the idea of Original Sin. He did not specially speak, and, indeed, there was no reason for him to speak, about his other beliefs or unbeliefs. He had not then compared the Trinity to a dance; but neither had he called adoring multitudes to the shrine of the Invisible King. But, standing at the end of the great scientific nineteenth century, he thought it time to announce that the one doctrine he did not believe in was Original Sin. Standing at the beginning of the still more scientific twentieth century, Mr. Aldous Huxley calmly announces that the one doctrine he does believe in is Original Sin. He may be a sceptic or a heretic about many things, but on that point he is quite orthodox. He may not hold many theological dogmas, but about this dogma he is quite dogmatic. There is one fragment of the ancient creed which he not only clings to, but declares to be necessary to all clear minds of the new generation. And that is the very fragment which Mr. Wells threw away thirty years ago, as something that would never be needed any more. The stone that the builder of Utopia rejected . . .
It is not a mere verbal coincidence that original thinkers believe in Original Sin. For really original thinkers like to think about origins. That should be obvious even to the negative thinkers of the nineteenth-century tradition, who for two or three generations claimed all originality, all novelty, all revolutionary change of thought for a book called The Origin of Species. But it is even more true of moral discovery than of material discovery; and it is even more true of the twentieth-century reaction than of the nineteenth-century revolution. Men who wish to get down to fundamentals perceive that there is a fundamental problem of evil. Men content to be more superficial are also content with a superficial fuss and bustle of improvement. The man in the mere routine of modern life is content to say that a modern gallows is a relatively humane instrument or that a modern cat-o’-nine tails is milder than an ancient Roman flagellum. But the original thinker will ask why any scourge or gibbet was ever needed, or ever even alleged to be needed? And that brings the original thinker back to original sin. For that is not affected as a universal thing by whether we approve or disapprove of the particular things. Whether we call it infamous tyranny or inevitable restraint, there is some sort of sin either in the scourger or the scourged.
Nevertheless, I often feel that the original thinker is not quite original enough. I mean that he does not get quite so near to the truth as the old tradition could take him. I say it without arrogance, for many of us owe the truth as much to tradition as to originality. But I am often struck by the fact that original thinkers originate trains of thought, but do not finish them. It is the great trouble with the advanced that they will not advance any further. Now, Mr. Aldous Huxley sees very clearly that medieval religion was more realistic than modern idealism and optimism. He says that the latest scientific view is more like the old Catholic view than was the intervening illusion of the Romantic Movement. But he adds that the scientific view of man necessitates a sort of original sin, if it be only the residuum of his animal ancestry.
Now, that is exactly where I should like him to advance a step further; and he does not. For sin, whatever else it is, is not merely the dregs of a bestial existence. It is something more subtle and spiritual, and is in some way connected with the very supremacy of the human spirit. Mr. Huxley must know well enough that this is so with the most execrable sins, such as often figure in his own admirable satires. It is not merely a matter of letting the ape and tiger die, for apes are not Pharisees, nor are tigers prigs. The elephant does not turn up his long nose at everything with any superior intention; and the totally unjust charge of hypocrisy might well be resented by any really sensitive and thin-skinned crocodile. The giraffe might be called a highbrow, but he is not really supercilious about his powers of Uplift. Man has scattered his own vices as well as virtues very arbitrarily among the animals, and there may be no more reason to accuse the peacock of pride than to accuse the pelican of charity.
The worst things in man are only possible to man. At least we must confine their existence to men, unless we are prepared to admit the existence of demons. There is thus another truth in the original conception of original sin, since even in sinning man originated something. His body may have come from animals, and his soul may be torn in pieces by all sorts of doctrinal disputes and quarrels among men. But, roughly speaking, it is quite clear that he did manufacture out of the old mud or blood of material origins, with whatever mixture of more mysterious elements, a special and a mortal poison. That poison is his own recipe; it is not merely decaying animal matter. That poison is most poisonous where there are fine scientific intellects or artistic imaginations to mix it. It is just as likely to be at its best — that is, at its worst — at the end of a civilization as at the beginning. Of this sort are all the hideous corruptions of culture; the pride, the perversions, the intellectual cruelties, the horrors of emotional exhaustion. You cannot explain that monstrous fruit by saying that our ancestors were arboreal; save, indeed, as an allegory of the Tree of Knowledge. The poison can take the form of every sort of culture — as, for instance, bacteria-culture. But the poison itself has always been there. Indeed it is as old as any memory of man. Wherefore, we have to posit of it that it also was of the human source and fountain head, that it was in the beginning, or, as the old theology affirms, original.
I suggest, therefore, with great respect, that it is not even now a case of having to admit that the old religion had come very near to the truths of the most modern science. It is rather a case of the most modern science having come very near to the truths of the old religion — but not quite near enough.
XXIX. On the New Religion Coming
THAT rather pleasant and even exciting cry that has been occasionally raised in recent years has been raised once again, the announcement of the New Religion. My criticism of that otherwise admirable diversion has always been, roughly speaking, a complaint that the New Religion was announced as appearing and never appeared. Even those who advertise in the magazines ‘an entirely new type of detective’ do produce some sort of detective, even if he is a detective who is rather easy to detect. Even those who say that the next issue will contain a passionate romance, involving an entirely bold and original situation between Man and Woman, do at least introduce into their disappointing anecdote some sort of objects, which might be mistaken for a woman and a man. Even cross-word puzzles are followed by complete solution, filling up all the spaces somehow; and even in a prize competition there is an answer, whether or no there is a prize. Nobody writes a mystery story about a corpse in the stoke-hole, and then simply leaves it in the stoke-hole in the last chapter, without any comment, however casual. Nobody who loses a millionaire on the first page of a sensational novel can escape the responsibility of finding him somehow or somewhere, before the last page, dead or alive. But in the case of the New Religion, there simply was no New Religion, alive or dead. There were simply a number of suggestions about how interesting it would be if there ever were a New Religion, just as it would be extremely interesting if there were a corpse in our own domestic stoke-hole; just as it would be thrilling to find a millionaire alive, or possibly even more delightful to find him dead. But we do not, in fact, in our daily walks through the world, find corpses in stoke-holes; we do not find dead millionaires, and we do not find New Religions. When we do, we do not indulge in long disquisitions about how interesting it would be if we did. When we do, we utter a loud cry, or otherwise draw attention to a definite and rather dramatic fact.
Now, the only reason given, in the case I mention, for saying that there would be a New Religion was the assertion (true or false) that the world was tired of the old religions. Even if this were true, it would be a very illogical basis for any such prophecy. I have no right to announce to the scientific world that I have discovered an entirely new animal, with a wholly extraordinary and unprecedented arrangement of horns and hooves, and then have no explanation to give, except that I am tired of eating beef and mutton. I have no right to send a telegram to the Astronomer Royal declaring that I have found a new star, and then afterwards explain to that distinguished and irritated official, with an air of fatalistic languor, that everybody is thoroughly sick of the poetry written about Mars and Venus and Jupiter, and all the pagan names of the planets. Those pagan gods and goddesses arc undoubtedly ancient; they are undoubtedly in one sense out of date; they are undoubtedly a little too trite and familiar in the literature of men who have long ceased to believe in them as real deities. But simply disbelieving in them does not of itself materialize a new and enormous comet, or precipitate even a falling star.
So it is in the social and moral and philosophical world. A good many of us are sometimes a little tired of journalism, especially of the journalists. There is really very good reason for saying that the Press in its present conditions is in danger of becoming an anomalous and anonymous bore. But I cannot go about telling people that I am bringing out a new kind of newspaper, or that I have invented a new way of conveying news, merely because I do not think that the old way with news is very new. A great many of us think that education, in its modern compulsory form, has got very much into a rut and is likely to become as narrow as any other routine. But I do not call that The New Education; I do not say that I am an educationist; God forbid! But on the subject of religion it would seem that anybody is allowed to announce anything. Anybody may draw any number of blank cheques on the bank of the future. Anybody may run up any number of bills for posterity to discharge when we are all dead, and cannot be charged with anything — even with r rash prediction. So far as I can understand, the only thing that anybody knows about the New Religion is that nobody will be a priest and everybody will be a prophet.
I do not for a moment suggest that the New Religion might not exist- The world has made a fool of itself in all sorts of ways from the beginning of time, but its rich stores of foolery are by no means exhausted yet. I can easily imagine a real, vivid, veritable New Religion, which is more than the prophet of the New Religion can do. I could make up a whole list of New Religions, at a guinea apiece, which would be quite as probable and presentable as any number of old religions such as have existed and may yet exist again. There is nothing, for instance, to prevent people from worshipping the infinitesimal instead of the infinite, and subdividing the atom in the search for the indivisible dot of divinity. It would be as sensible to search for God with microscopes as to search for God with telescopes. And that was what a number of the cosmic agnostics really did in the nineteenth century. I can imagine a religion founded entirely on the psychology of contrast, so that children would be kept in coal-cellars that they might appreciate occasional sun beams. I can imagine a religion founded on the inversion of day and night, and the idea that our dreams are real and our waking life is a dream. I can understand a man holding that everything except himself is a dream. It will be truly remarked that all these New Religions are stark staring mad. They are; but they are something. They are ideas of some sort; they are statements with some meaning; they are things that could be affirmed or denied. But the New Religion in the weekly paper is Nothing; and I object to being told to bow down to Nothing, or to be bullied by Nothing, or to be made a slave of Nothing, because it is supposed to be New.
XXX. On the Great God Namse
AT last I have found the essentials of the true Faith of the Future; the creed which all thoughtful men can accept; the creed that suits itself to the best thought of the age; the religion that is purely spiritual, as Dr. Barnes would say, being purely in the spirit of the times; the religion that appeals to something deeper than creed and dogma; the religion for the plain man, for the practical man, and especially for the business man; the vital appreciation of values in which we can all agree; the formula that will unite all the Churches, reconcile all the conflicting parties in the Church of England, and finally unite, after two hundred years of civil war, the nine hundred and ninety-nine True Religions of Scotland. Need I say that I allude to that vivid religion, the worship of Namse, the God of Wealth?
A worship so modern, so rational, so much in touch with the whole spirit of the time, cannot be long in extending its full and formal establishment from Tibet to Tooting. I say its full and formal establishment, because it is obvious that the deeper, quieter, more truly spiritual influence of the god has long been prevalent in Tooting and elsewhere. But, though we have most of us seen a good many manifestations of the general affection felt for Namse, the God of Wealth, I have never seen any manifestation of him half so attractive or so jolly as his appearance in a coloured photograph reproduced from Tibet. The ordinary dingy, sulky millionaire is afraid to wear crowns and crests like the ancient tyrants; he knows in his wicked heart that he has not really got the sort of popular authority that belonged to the old princes and priests. He therefore ‘dresses with great simplicity’; and has paragraphs in all the papers to say so. There is none of that nonsense about dear old Namse. Whatever criticisms the fastidious might make on his appearance, nobody can say that he dresses with great simplicity. His face, or mask, rather suggests that of Mr. Hoover in a rage; and in this also there may be something symbolical. But would that we could hope to see the President of the United States coming out of the White House at Washington in any costume so conspicuous and so charming! Men seem to have lost the radiant expansiveness which makes such a parade possible. Anyhow, the God of Wealth is not ashamed of his wealth. There is only one snag in the situation, and possibly in the religion. The figure which follows in the procession immediately after the God of Wealth is described as the God of Hell.
These extraordinary ceremonial figures and formalities come from a celebration called the Old Dance at the Tibetan Monastery of Chord in Kansu, the photographs being taken by Dr. J. F. Rock. There has always been a great deal of talk about the religious mysteries in the interior of Tibet; but in the days of my mystical youth they were generally represented as being of a more ethereal and less entertaining character. In the days when Theosophy was at its widest moment of influence, we were often told that truth could only be found in the monasteries of Tibet. But we certainly were not told that the truth found there would be a grinning glorification of the power of Money, or a dance of a horned devil to typify the instant menace of death and hell. The monks of the real Tibet seemed to be rather more realistic than the Mahatmas of the imaginary Tibet. I, for one, would much rather take part in that pageant of pantomime masks, where everything is painted in bright colours, and is popular, and at any rate means something, than sit waiting in an esoteric salon for a message from a Mahatma, who had nothing to say except, ‘You have been all things; you shall achieve at last the right to be nothing.’ The jolly fellows in Choni, at any rate, say what they mean; and when they worship the God of Wealth they say so. They do not serve God and Mammon, but serve Mammon as God; and at least get something out of it in the way of glitter and colour and painting the town red and gold. They do not have to endure the worship of wealth, and then have to endure refinement as well.
How much more melancholy is the condition of those, in modernized and rationalized Western communities, who have to go about conducting secretly the cult of the Great God Namse! How much more uncomfortable it is to call on Namse morning, noon, and night, and yet never be allowed to call him by his name! How miserable is our condition in industrial Europe and America, who dare not call on Namse as Namse, but have to call him National Welfare, or International Peace, or the British Empire or the New Republic, or Progress, or Humanity, or some ghastly thing! Instead of the simple and heartfelt cry for More Money, which might come sincerely from so many of our hearts, there must be a mystification and a secret language, and the giving to the god of every other title except his own golden name. Yet even this particular Asiatic name might perhaps be useful to persons in this delicate position. The mask must be transparent in Tibet, but it might still serve to mask the mystery in Tooting. It might still be used as a polite political evasion, except to those who had profited by the information of Dr. Rock. Suppose a Member of Parliament asks as a supplementary question, ‘Can the right hon. gentle man tell the House why he bestowed a peerage on Mr. Bunk, formerly known as the Vanishing Book maker?’ It would be healthy, but all too heroic, if the Cabinet Minister rose and said simply, ‘I did it for Money.’ But nobody could complain of unparliamentary language if he rose and said with great gravity, ‘I did it for Namse.’ It would never do, if, when the orator asks the rhetorical question, ‘What is it that drives our best and boldest Empire-builders forth to establish order in the ends of the earth, what is the mysterious impulse and vision which draws out of them all their deep indomitable powers for the expansion of England?’ . . . It would never do if the whole audience answered with one approving shout, ‘Money!’ But no harm would be done if the audience were allowed to murmur and intone, as a sort of liturgical chorus, ‘Namse’. It would always be possible to exhort the young to devote their lives earnestly and laboriously to Namse, where it would sound a little crude, perhaps, to tell them to devote themselves entirely to raking in the shekels or getting hold of the dibs. Considering the strange way in which Christian traditions still linger about even in this enlightened age, it might often be safer to say that our reason and conscience required us to worship Namse, rather than that they required us to worship Mammon.
XXXI. On the Innocence of Macaulay
IN the middle of an Italian popular ceremony, or pageant of the sort some call ‘medieval’, with tools and emblems of trades like those of the old guilds, I suddenly remembered my boyhood: and a particular passage in Macaulay’s Essays. Macaulay’s Essays are now almost as distant as the Middle Ages; indeed, in some ways more dead than the Middle Ages. But they do exactly sum up and clarify the modern mood which was a reaction from the Middle Ages; and we are just sufficiently removed from it to compare the two. If Macaulay would not have understood what we mean by ‘the co-operative movement’ or ‘the unit of the trade-union’, it is because we have already grown so much more medieval than he was. There was also, of course, something that was shiny and shallow about his style, which was the very reverse of medieval. Nevertheless, Macaulay also had his medieval virtues; he knew what he meant; he had the faith of a child in the rights of reason; and his chief fault was living within his own Victorian limitations, which was also the weakness of many medieval writers, when they too confidently adorned their profound general principles with illustrations from the habits of the salamander or the moral lesson to be learnt from the unicorn.
It is not a mere verbal coincidence that original thinkers believe in Original Sin. For really original thinkers like to think about origins. That should be obvious even to the negative thinkers of the nineteenth-century tradition, who for two or three generations claimed all originality, all novelty, all revolutionary change of thought for a book called The Origin of Species. But it is even more true of moral discovery than of material discovery; and it is even more true of the twentieth-century reaction than of the nineteenth-century revolution. Men who wish to get down to fundamentals perceive that there is a fundamental problem of evil. Men content to be more superficial are also content with a superficial fuss and bustle of improvement. The man in the mere routine of modern life is content to say that a modern gallows is a relatively humane instrument or that a modern cat-o’-nine tails is milder than an ancient Roman flagellum. But the original thinker will ask why any scourge or gibbet was ever needed, or ever even alleged to be needed? And that brings the original thinker back to original sin. For that is not affected as a universal thing by whether we approve or disapprove of the particular things. Whether we call it infamous tyranny or inevitable restraint, there is some sort of sin either in the scourger or the scourged.
Nevertheless, I often feel that the original thinker is not quite original enough. I mean that he does not get quite so near to the truth as the old tradition could take him. I say it without arrogance, for many of us owe the truth as much to tradition as to originality. But I am often struck by the fact that original thinkers originate trains of thought, but do not finish them. It is the great trouble with the advanced that they will not advance any further. Now, Mr. Aldous Huxley sees very clearly that medieval religion was more realistic than modern idealism and optimism. He says that the latest scientific view is more like the old Catholic view than was the intervening illusion of the Romantic Movement. But he adds that the scientific view of man necessitates a sort of original sin, if it be only the residuum of his animal ancestry.
Now, that is exactly where I should like him to advance a step further; and he does not. For sin, whatever else it is, is not merely the dregs of a bestial existence. It is something more subtle and spiritual, and is in some way connected with the very supremacy of the human spirit. Mr. Huxley must know well enough that this is so with the most execrable sins, such as often figure in his own admirable satires. It is not merely a matter of letting the ape and tiger die, for apes are not Pharisees, nor are tigers prigs. The elephant does not turn up his long nose at everything with any superior intention; and the totally unjust charge of hypocrisy might well be resented by any really sensitive and thin-skinned crocodile. The giraffe might be called a highbrow, but he is not really supercilious about his powers of Uplift. Man has scattered his own vices as well as virtues very arbitrarily among the animals, and there may be no more reason to accuse the peacock of pride than to accuse the pelican of charity.
The worst things in man are only possible to man. At least we must confine their existence to men, unless we are prepared to admit the existence of demons. There is thus another truth in the original conception of original sin, since even in sinning man originated something. His body may have come from animals, and his soul may be torn in pieces by all sorts of doctrinal disputes and quarrels among men. But, roughly speaking, it is quite clear that he did manufacture out of the old mud or blood of material origins, with whatever mixture of more mysterious elements, a special and a mortal poison. That poison is his own recipe; it is not merely decaying animal matter. That poison is most poisonous where there are fine scientific intellects or artistic imaginations to mix it. It is just as likely to be at its best — that is, at its worst — at the end of a civilization as at the beginning. Of this sort are all the hideous corruptions of culture; the pride, the perversions, the intellectual cruelties, the horrors of emotional exhaustion. You cannot explain that monstrous fruit by saying that our ancestors were arboreal; save, indeed, as an allegory of the Tree of Knowledge. The poison can take the form of every sort of culture — as, for instance, bacteria-culture. But the poison itself has always been there. Indeed it is as old as any memory of man. Wherefore, we have to posit of it that it also was of the human source and fountain head, that it was in the beginning, or, as the old theology affirms, original.
I suggest, therefore, with great respect, that it is not even now a case of having to admit that the old religion had come very near to the truths of the most modern science. It is rather a case of the most modern science having come very near to the truths of the old religion — but not quite near enough.
XXIX. On the New Religion Coming
THAT rather pleasant and even exciting cry that has been occasionally raised in recent years has been raised once again, the announcement of the New Religion. My criticism of that otherwise admirable diversion has always been, roughly speaking, a complaint that the New Religion was announced as appearing and never appeared. Even those who advertise in the magazines ‘an entirely new type of detective’ do produce some sort of detective, even if he is a detective who is rather easy to detect. Even those who say that the next issue will contain a passionate romance, involving an entirely bold and original situation between Man and Woman, do at least introduce into their disappointing anecdote some sort of objects, which might be mistaken for a woman and a man. Even cross-word puzzles are followed by complete solution, filling up all the spaces somehow; and even in a prize competition there is an answer, whether or no there is a prize. Nobody writes a mystery story about a corpse in the stoke-hole, and then simply leaves it in the stoke-hole in the last chapter, without any comment, however casual. Nobody who loses a millionaire on the first page of a sensational novel can escape the responsibility of finding him somehow or somewhere, before the last page, dead or alive. But in the case of the New Religion, there simply was no New Religion, alive or dead. There were simply a number of suggestions about how interesting it would be if there ever were a New Religion, just as it would be extremely interesting if there were a corpse in our own domestic stoke-hole; just as it would be thrilling to find a millionaire alive, or possibly even more delightful to find him dead. But we do not, in fact, in our daily walks through the world, find corpses in stoke-holes; we do not find dead millionaires, and we do not find New Religions. When we do, we do not indulge in long disquisitions about how interesting it would be if we did. When we do, we utter a loud cry, or otherwise draw attention to a definite and rather dramatic fact.
Now, the only reason given, in the case I mention, for saying that there would be a New Religion was the assertion (true or false) that the world was tired of the old religions. Even if this were true, it would be a very illogical basis for any such prophecy. I have no right to announce to the scientific world that I have discovered an entirely new animal, with a wholly extraordinary and unprecedented arrangement of horns and hooves, and then have no explanation to give, except that I am tired of eating beef and mutton. I have no right to send a telegram to the Astronomer Royal declaring that I have found a new star, and then afterwards explain to that distinguished and irritated official, with an air of fatalistic languor, that everybody is thoroughly sick of the poetry written about Mars and Venus and Jupiter, and all the pagan names of the planets. Those pagan gods and goddesses arc undoubtedly ancient; they are undoubtedly in one sense out of date; they are undoubtedly a little too trite and familiar in the literature of men who have long ceased to believe in them as real deities. But simply disbelieving in them does not of itself materialize a new and enormous comet, or precipitate even a falling star.
So it is in the social and moral and philosophical world. A good many of us are sometimes a little tired of journalism, especially of the journalists. There is really very good reason for saying that the Press in its present conditions is in danger of becoming an anomalous and anonymous bore. But I cannot go about telling people that I am bringing out a new kind of newspaper, or that I have invented a new way of conveying news, merely because I do not think that the old way with news is very new. A great many of us think that education, in its modern compulsory form, has got very much into a rut and is likely to become as narrow as any other routine. But I do not call that The New Education; I do not say that I am an educationist; God forbid! But on the subject of religion it would seem that anybody is allowed to announce anything. Anybody may draw any number of blank cheques on the bank of the future. Anybody may run up any number of bills for posterity to discharge when we are all dead, and cannot be charged with anything — even with r rash prediction. So far as I can understand, the only thing that anybody knows about the New Religion is that nobody will be a priest and everybody will be a prophet.
I do not for a moment suggest that the New Religion might not exist- The world has made a fool of itself in all sorts of ways from the beginning of time, but its rich stores of foolery are by no means exhausted yet. I can easily imagine a real, vivid, veritable New Religion, which is more than the prophet of the New Religion can do. I could make up a whole list of New Religions, at a guinea apiece, which would be quite as probable and presentable as any number of old religions such as have existed and may yet exist again. There is nothing, for instance, to prevent people from worshipping the infinitesimal instead of the infinite, and subdividing the atom in the search for the indivisible dot of divinity. It would be as sensible to search for God with microscopes as to search for God with telescopes. And that was what a number of the cosmic agnostics really did in the nineteenth century. I can imagine a religion founded entirely on the psychology of contrast, so that children would be kept in coal-cellars that they might appreciate occasional sun beams. I can imagine a religion founded on the inversion of day and night, and the idea that our dreams are real and our waking life is a dream. I can understand a man holding that everything except himself is a dream. It will be truly remarked that all these New Religions are stark staring mad. They are; but they are something. They are ideas of some sort; they are statements with some meaning; they are things that could be affirmed or denied. But the New Religion in the weekly paper is Nothing; and I object to being told to bow down to Nothing, or to be bullied by Nothing, or to be made a slave of Nothing, because it is supposed to be New.
XXX. On the Great God Namse
AT last I have found the essentials of the true Faith of the Future; the creed which all thoughtful men can accept; the creed that suits itself to the best thought of the age; the religion that is purely spiritual, as Dr. Barnes would say, being purely in the spirit of the times; the religion that appeals to something deeper than creed and dogma; the religion for the plain man, for the practical man, and especially for the business man; the vital appreciation of values in which we can all agree; the formula that will unite all the Churches, reconcile all the conflicting parties in the Church of England, and finally unite, after two hundred years of civil war, the nine hundred and ninety-nine True Religions of Scotland. Need I say that I allude to that vivid religion, the worship of Namse, the God of Wealth?
A worship so modern, so rational, so much in touch with the whole spirit of the time, cannot be long in extending its full and formal establishment from Tibet to Tooting. I say its full and formal establishment, because it is obvious that the deeper, quieter, more truly spiritual influence of the god has long been prevalent in Tooting and elsewhere. But, though we have most of us seen a good many manifestations of the general affection felt for Namse, the God of Wealth, I have never seen any manifestation of him half so attractive or so jolly as his appearance in a coloured photograph reproduced from Tibet. The ordinary dingy, sulky millionaire is afraid to wear crowns and crests like the ancient tyrants; he knows in his wicked heart that he has not really got the sort of popular authority that belonged to the old princes and priests. He therefore ‘dresses with great simplicity’; and has paragraphs in all the papers to say so. There is none of that nonsense about dear old Namse. Whatever criticisms the fastidious might make on his appearance, nobody can say that he dresses with great simplicity. His face, or mask, rather suggests that of Mr. Hoover in a rage; and in this also there may be something symbolical. But would that we could hope to see the President of the United States coming out of the White House at Washington in any costume so conspicuous and so charming! Men seem to have lost the radiant expansiveness which makes such a parade possible. Anyhow, the God of Wealth is not ashamed of his wealth. There is only one snag in the situation, and possibly in the religion. The figure which follows in the procession immediately after the God of Wealth is described as the God of Hell.
These extraordinary ceremonial figures and formalities come from a celebration called the Old Dance at the Tibetan Monastery of Chord in Kansu, the photographs being taken by Dr. J. F. Rock. There has always been a great deal of talk about the religious mysteries in the interior of Tibet; but in the days of my mystical youth they were generally represented as being of a more ethereal and less entertaining character. In the days when Theosophy was at its widest moment of influence, we were often told that truth could only be found in the monasteries of Tibet. But we certainly were not told that the truth found there would be a grinning glorification of the power of Money, or a dance of a horned devil to typify the instant menace of death and hell. The monks of the real Tibet seemed to be rather more realistic than the Mahatmas of the imaginary Tibet. I, for one, would much rather take part in that pageant of pantomime masks, where everything is painted in bright colours, and is popular, and at any rate means something, than sit waiting in an esoteric salon for a message from a Mahatma, who had nothing to say except, ‘You have been all things; you shall achieve at last the right to be nothing.’ The jolly fellows in Choni, at any rate, say what they mean; and when they worship the God of Wealth they say so. They do not serve God and Mammon, but serve Mammon as God; and at least get something out of it in the way of glitter and colour and painting the town red and gold. They do not have to endure the worship of wealth, and then have to endure refinement as well.
How much more melancholy is the condition of those, in modernized and rationalized Western communities, who have to go about conducting secretly the cult of the Great God Namse! How much more uncomfortable it is to call on Namse morning, noon, and night, and yet never be allowed to call him by his name! How miserable is our condition in industrial Europe and America, who dare not call on Namse as Namse, but have to call him National Welfare, or International Peace, or the British Empire or the New Republic, or Progress, or Humanity, or some ghastly thing! Instead of the simple and heartfelt cry for More Money, which might come sincerely from so many of our hearts, there must be a mystification and a secret language, and the giving to the god of every other title except his own golden name. Yet even this particular Asiatic name might perhaps be useful to persons in this delicate position. The mask must be transparent in Tibet, but it might still serve to mask the mystery in Tooting. It might still be used as a polite political evasion, except to those who had profited by the information of Dr. Rock. Suppose a Member of Parliament asks as a supplementary question, ‘Can the right hon. gentle man tell the House why he bestowed a peerage on Mr. Bunk, formerly known as the Vanishing Book maker?’ It would be healthy, but all too heroic, if the Cabinet Minister rose and said simply, ‘I did it for Money.’ But nobody could complain of unparliamentary language if he rose and said with great gravity, ‘I did it for Namse.’ It would never do, if, when the orator asks the rhetorical question, ‘What is it that drives our best and boldest Empire-builders forth to establish order in the ends of the earth, what is the mysterious impulse and vision which draws out of them all their deep indomitable powers for the expansion of England?’ . . . It would never do if the whole audience answered with one approving shout, ‘Money!’ But no harm would be done if the audience were allowed to murmur and intone, as a sort of liturgical chorus, ‘Namse’. It would always be possible to exhort the young to devote their lives earnestly and laboriously to Namse, where it would sound a little crude, perhaps, to tell them to devote themselves entirely to raking in the shekels or getting hold of the dibs. Considering the strange way in which Christian traditions still linger about even in this enlightened age, it might often be safer to say that our reason and conscience required us to worship Namse, rather than that they required us to worship Mammon.
XXXI. On the Innocence of Macaulay
IN the middle of an Italian popular ceremony, or pageant of the sort some call ‘medieval’, with tools and emblems of trades like those of the old guilds, I suddenly remembered my boyhood: and a particular passage in Macaulay’s Essays. Macaulay’s Essays are now almost as distant as the Middle Ages; indeed, in some ways more dead than the Middle Ages. But they do exactly sum up and clarify the modern mood which was a reaction from the Middle Ages; and we are just sufficiently removed from it to compare the two. If Macaulay would not have understood what we mean by ‘the co-operative movement’ or ‘the unit of the trade-union’, it is because we have already grown so much more medieval than he was. There was also, of course, something that was shiny and shallow about his style, which was the very reverse of medieval. Nevertheless, Macaulay also had his medieval virtues; he knew what he meant; he had the faith of a child in the rights of reason; and his chief fault was living within his own Victorian limitations, which was also the weakness of many medieval writers, when they too confidently adorned their profound general principles with illustrations from the habits of the salamander or the moral lesson to be learnt from the unicorn.
