Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be able to cut them short with a single inspired word.  One of them will begin, “The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in Nature....”  “Methuselahite,” I shall say sharply; “good morning.”  “Human Life,” another will say, “Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freed from creed and dogma....”  “Methuselahite!” I shall yell.  “Out you go!” “My religion is the Religion of Joy,” a third will explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), “the Religion of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my....”  “Methuselahite!” I shall cry again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down.  Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did only the other day):  “Moods and impressions are the only realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing.  I could hardly therefore define my religion....”  “I can,” I should say, somewhat sternly.  “Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won’t fulfil it.”

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.  We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity.  We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions.  We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art.  It will almost certainly happen—­it can almost certainly be prophesied—­that in this saturnalia of sophistry there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise cowardice.  And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice!  “Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?” the soldier would say as he ran away.  “Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?” the householder would say as he hid under the table.  “As long as there are roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?” would come the voice of the citizen from under the bed.  It would be quite as easy to defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in many recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic.  When that last grand sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you may depend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, a great stir among the little people who live among books and platforms.  There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism:  with pomps and priests and altars.  Its devout crusaders will vow themselves in thousands with a great vow to live long.  But there is one comfort:  they won’t.