when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.  Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration.  But it would be very much nearer to the truth.  The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light.  Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination.  Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution.  He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land.  Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types.  He is an unselfish egoist.  An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.  Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light.  Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.  Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work.  That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.  Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.  Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.  The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and moon.  If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive.  He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his neighbour measles.  He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad.  This ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world.  About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism.  Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right