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men have never up to this time been normal men, while understanding at the same time that health is forever breaking through the settled absurdities, and that it is immensely contagious and must some day utterly prevail.

The academic psychologists talk about the fickle and convulsive mentality of the mob; but they commonly fail to observe that riots are made of precisely the same stuff as revolutions, and that the pathology of the mob-mind applies as well to the restless mutations of states and empires as to the swifter moods of street-rabbles.

The bottom reason why history is formless and irrational, subject to inconsequent changes and reactions, revealing no clear projective purpose, is that it is in the main a story of mobs. One must consent to the proposition that the human race hitherto has, on the whole, behaved itself very much in the manner of a mob-if only it be duly insisted and allowed that the records of the race are here and there shot through with illustrious stories of gathering order and noble reasonableness.

This is not a doctrine of pessimism. On the contrary, it is a doctrine of faith and high expectancy. Unless one begins with an understanding of the fact that the historic peoples have never really done their best, it is impossible to believe in the possibility-much less the actual imminence of a pentecost or an epiph. any. Such an understanding lies in the background of the Christian doctrine of universal aberration, or original sin. It should be confessed that this idea has suffered monstrous and incredible caricatures and needs to be restated in terms that modern biology and psychology can accept. But it still stands on its own feet, and is bound to be vindicated as the base line of social science. The law of human aberration bears the general relation to sociology that the New

tonian law of gravitation bears to physics.

Paraphrasing Sir Isaac Newton's formula, one may venture to say-by accommodation of course, since there is no real congruity between social and physical science-that a community's working and fightingstrength diminishes with the increase of the square of the distance between its political idealism and its business system; and that the energy of its repulsion for other communities, or disposition to fight them, increases in the same ratio.

Stating the same principle from the standpoint of personal relations, we may set it down that the sanity and validity of the individual varies inversely as the squared distance between his religious or political ideals and his day's-work; and that he feels. repulsion for persons of a different interest or persuasion and is moved to defend his own morals, with an impulse that is strong in the degree of their abstraction and invalidity. This is the same as to say that in proportion to the aloofness of a man's idealism, its lack of practical bearing upon his personal conduct, is he zealous to impose it upon other

men.

It is due to no conscious hypocrisy, but to that more desperate malady of the mind, the blindness of the Pharisee, that the prosecution of an abstract or platonic virtue becomes an end in itself, a feverish infatuation, against which the temperate strength of those who invest their idealism in good work has only rarely prevailed. The champions of abstract principles of right can commonly command the suffrages of the crowd in proportion to the loftiness of their abstractions. Hence it has come to pass that nations have in general been ruled by men lacking in elemental strength, men whose power was in truth not theirs, but was imputed to them by a system of legal conventions.

The most civilised societies have

most conspicuously been governed by the weak. These, while forever fierce to maintain their own moral theories by sword and scaffold, have fortified themselves by a cult of pacifism-insisting that all moral questions ought to be settled by earnest conversation, without resort to elemental forces, the nature of which they never have understood.

Under this immemorial rule of the weak, religion has been protected by those who lacked the energy of faith, the arts have been patronised by men having no ability to practise them, business has been bullied by people devoid of enterprise, and the sacredness of property has been championed by those who never earned a meal.

Such is the state of human affairs that Christianity came into the world to cure. The question was: How can a fresh start be made on a normal basis? How may the frightful gap between the conceptive faculties of mankind and its executive faculties be closed up? What new motive or method can be invoked to restore men to wholeness or holiness?

Now if the sin, or schism, that splits life in two were grounded in the primordial character of man there would be no hope. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin-and celestial wings do not sprout from the shoulders of mortals. The reasonableness of the Christian enterprise rests wholly, and rests securely, upon the fact that sin is abnormal. It is not natural. Therefore it is curable. The blindness of the Pharisee is not beyond the reach of therapeutics Father, forgive them, for they cannot see!

To say that the light in the ruling class of Judea had become darkness was to say that the abstraction of their legal logic and the extravagance of their national idealism had dulled their natural sense. It is a

fact of moral pathology that every excess of sentimentality is balanced by sordidness. by sordidness. Super-righteousness is dogged by cruelty. And the treatment of any fine word-Truth, Honour, Humanity, Liberty-as if it were a real thing, blunts a man's interest in the embodiment of the thing.

Consider now the terrible consequences that flow from this pathological fact, and the desperate pass to which it brings the world-requiring a prodigy of love and faith to restore the health of society. Although in the deepest sense it is not natural for men to be sentimental and sordid, legal and cruel, magniloquent and mean, although it is true that in the mass we are not natural born fools but have rather achieved our rapturous and violent follystill it remains an historical fact that this madness has propagated itself through the ages with dreadful contagion, and has become a kind of second nature.

Here lies the profound truth of what is called original sin—the sin of Adam. It is not absurd to sayas in a parable, of course-that if the first of “articulately speaking men” (it is Homer's significant phrase) had been an effectual artist or a good farmer instead of a futile moralist and rhetorician, the trouble would not have happened. For in view of the virulence of the contagion everything depended on getting started right.

The temptation is intrinsic and unescapable. We may understand that at a certain momentous epoch in the biologic process a being broke into existence that could properly be called Man-because he could speak. The ability to use words is the power of abstract or conceptive thought. And that implies duality of consciousness-the birth of the imagination as a faculty capable of standing aloof and apart from the current of passing experience. With the entrance of this thaumaturgic power of

abstract thought-the power to conceive things that do not exist and therefore to live, if one please, in an unreal world-we have the stage set for the tragedy of the Temptation and Fall.

It is in the power of the Man to pass out of the realm of creaturehood and into the realm of creatorship. He can cease to be merely the Finest Thing Made, and can become the Maker of Things. He can cease to be governed wholly by an external law and can begin to be self-governing. All he has to do is to hold himself together, to insist upon continuing to be all of one piece-as the naïve animals are. But he has a difficulty that they have not-since he has a new and marvellous consciousness that transcends reality and lures him away from the rough contacts of experience.

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Shall he use his imagination-his power to conceive things that do not exist—as a means of escape from the harshness of reality? Or shall he be artist-employing the power of the imagination to master the difficulties of existence and make new things exist? The Lord of Life advises him to take the latter course -tells him to dress and keep the Garden. That requires only red blood. It requires courage, faith in the practicability of one's own ideal. But behold! the Serpent—imme. morial symbol of cold-blooded intellectuality, "the native hue of resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought"-offers a different, a disastrous counsel. Adam is advised to leave the conquest of nature to inferior beings and to devote himself to mental uplift and ethical culture -"to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil!"—to get right, and acquire rights, without risk of body or venture of faith.

The Man refuses to take God for granted and elects to think his way to righteousness. He rejects the creative life and prefers to refine upon

his creaturehood. And this choice we are told is the spring of the unnumbered woes that have fallen upon mankind.

Remember this story stands in the forefront of a literature recording the stages of a brave effort made by a particular race of Asiatics to escape from the spiritual thrall of the Orient. Asia to this day holds stubbornly to the choice that Adam is said to have made. The inner life of the East is mainly characterised in India by spiritual wistfulness, and in China by scholastic pedantry. The peoples of these lands may be said to be the most cultivated races on the planet. They are among the most unsuccessful in the dressing and keeping of the Garden. India has always been afflicted with mighty famines, and has never learned to water its deserts or drain its swamps. And China has not learned to make good roads or to uncover the vast coal-measure beneath its soil. China lies as a helpless and dangerous derelict adrift in the heaving sea of world-conflict.

There is point and pathos in the newspaper story that has recently gone the rounds, to the effect that twenty-five thousand persons in British India have been killed by snakebites since the beginning of the war. The wile of distempered wisdom is still prevailing; the heel of the Son of the Woman has not yet bruised the serpent's head.

Sir Edwin Arnold in his Light of Asia writes: "The East bowed low before the West in silent, deep disdain; she heard the legions thunder past, then plunged in thought again." That is a true description of the pride and impotence of the Orient in its relation to the occidental races.

Christianity crowns the scriptural tradition with a definite revolt from this orientalism-the substance of original sin. The historic Christ is

an indissuadable apostate from the life of the Orient. He is an Asiatic standing with his back to Asia and stretching out his revealing hands toward Europe and America.

There are, of course, a mass of oriental legends clustering about the timeless and incomparable name of Jesus. It is an offence to sound canons of historical and literary interpretation to suppose that these are characteristic of their subject. Men are not made famous for being like everybody else in their neighbourhood-though it is natural enough that their contemporaries should try to describe them in terms of their own habitual thought. If Jesus had been what the orientalisers among us suppose him to have been, he would have been lost in the Palestinian census. It is absurd to state the meaning of a man whose fame after two thousand years is worship, in terms that are not distinguishable from the pre-Christian cult of yogis, or the orthodoxy of the doctors he disputed with.

Jesus is the pivotal personality of the ages, because he pioneered the way of escape from the morbid ideality and intellectualism that had complete possession of the orbis ter rarum of his day. He was crucified because he was alone in the world and had declared war against it. He strove mightily not to be alone. He did not intend to be a victim-nor refuse to be. His intolerable offence was his awful realism-his emphasis of the preciousness of incarnate life. He insisted, in the teeth of the scribes and doctors-and of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle-that the fine thing to do with the mind is to enflesh it to spend its force upon living stuff and substance.

To make much of the words of Christ is to make sure of misunderstanding him. Did he say this, or that? It does not much matter. He is not a philosopher, but rather a man of affairs-the first and authen

tic type of that new order. He is the despair of philosophers, because he comes to deliver the world from the rule of words. He is the inventor of credit-capital, socialised commerce and the corporate idea. That is to say, he is the prime illustrator of the practical value of faith, the advan tages of level reciprocity and the power of free combination.

The ecumenical church was the projection of the personality of Jesus. It spent itself and was lost four hundred years ago, though not beyond recovery in another form. It was the world's most magnificent and successful experiment in social administration. Its success was due to its militant realism-its conquest of racial prejudice, puristic religi osity and the doctrinairism of sects. Its failure was due to a revival in the world at large of the malignancy of the world's old diseases.

To think of Jesus as a proletarian reformer, a champion of the poor, striving to broaden down the social law to the level of the disinherited, is to blunt the point of his worldtransforming enterprise. He undertook to normalise society, to deliver it from its inherent deadlock-by cancelling out the legal fictions that support the arbitrary power of incompetents. He set out to establish on a basis of social authority the intrinsic and self-vindicating strength of the

sane.

In proclaiming the rule of the servant Jesus penetrated the oriental and classical illusion, that assumes the weakness of those who spend their imagination and devotion in physical ministries to life. He saw in the tender carefulness of a servingman for the comfort of his master a celebration of the spiritual mastery of material things in their relation to living persons. To him this was a foreshowing of that artistic-scientific power-the power of great builders, chemists, artists and engineerswhich is assuredly destined to take

the control of politics out of the nerveless hands of legalists and rhetoricians.

By dint of profound sanity, a genius of simplicity that was proof against sophistication, Jesus understood a truth that is now at last beginning to be apparent event to pedagogic psychologists, to wit: that energy of will and intellect is the ability to make firm decisions concerning the relative worth of things for the practical uses of life; and consequently that powerful personalities cannot be bred otherwise than in eager and interested contact with material values and life-sustain. ing processes. Jesus knew that it had been provided in the ground-plan of the world that people who live by their legal privileges, in aloofness from the life-struggle, shall decline in intelligence and personal force. To say that the servant shall rule at length is to prophesy in terms of science. It amounts merely to saying that the strong shall rule at length.

The Church of the Middle Ages was a pioneering adventure toward a sane social system— system in which personal validity becomes the same thing as social authority. This is the heart of the democratic idea. And the Church of the great ecclesiastical administrators was a social order that crossed the frontiers of race and caste and opened the way for a peasant man of whatever breed to mount to the throne of the Servant of Servants. How lethal is the spell of prescriptive time! We talk now of an ecumenic conscience, power, social order-as if it were a dream of benevolent hope, taxing the credulity of realistic minds. Yet the thing was once done-and stood for a thousand years. We have simply forgotten.

We have forgotten that many generations of men like ourselves tilled the soil, built cities, went about their daily work and play, nourished and sustained in the confident expecta

tion that the best that could befall mankind was planned and half-accomplished in the actual living body of the Church. But the breath of the spiritual plague of Asia, the malific east wind that blows across the world-blighted that expectation. It was not to be-in that manner. We were not to arrive at the Great Deliverance by the way of the Militant Church, but by the way of another militancy less militancy less gracious, and less creditable to the human spirit.

It was possible in either of two ways to bring into the light of universal acknowledgment the truth that service is stronger than privilege, and that goodness and power are, in the ground-plan of nature, one and the same thing. The way of the Church was that goodness should go forth into the world proclaiming its right of dominion and summoning the free wills of men to the conquest of the kingdom. of the kingdom. That way came within sight of success. It covered the world with the organic tissues of a new and transforming order. But on the whole, we say, it failed. In the sixteenth century the hope of the militant and ecumenic church was practically abandoned. Men ceased to believe that goodness could fight, that it could mass its forces and conquer the world. The institutions of the ideal were thrust out of the forum and market-place. The Church became the ward of the state, and was left to nourish its baffled hope in a region of high abstraction.

The plot that has culminated in the Great War began to work out its fatalities four hundred years ago. But these fatalities are not wholly tragic. On the contrary they lead straight to the goal toward which the militant church strove-but now by a different road.

The Church said: Given the organisation of goodness on a grand scale and we shall arrive at power. But it is equally true to say: Given the

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