Now, this is one of the two or three vital defences of working democracy.  The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method.  But even the machinery of voting is profoundly Christian in this practical sense—­that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it.  It is a mystical adventure; it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves.  That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom.  There is nothing really humble about the abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindoo is mild, but he is not meek.  But there is something psychologically Christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion of the prominent.  To say that voting is particularly Christian may seem somewhat curious.  To say that canvassing is Christian may seem quite crazy.  But canvassing is very Christian in its primary idea.  It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man, “Friend, go up higher.”  Or if there is some slight defect in canvassing, that is in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only because it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser.

Aristocracy is not an institution:  aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one.  It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world.

It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern “force” that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility.  The swiftest things are the softest things.  A bird is active, because a bird is soft.  A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard.  The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.  The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force.  In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.  Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.”  They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity.  Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.  This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art.  Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies.  Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet.  It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites.  Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages.  In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute.  Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about