Gladstone, he announced it as his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thought self-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thought self-evidently ridiculous.  And yet if we take any typical man of the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley’s sublime thing scoffed at, and Huxley’s ridiculous thing taken seriously.  I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley’s may be found in Mr. George Moore.  He has one of the most critical, appreciative and atmospheric talents of the age.  He has lived in most of the sets of the age, and through most of the fashions of the age.  He has held, at one time or another, most of the opinions of the age.  Above all, he has not only thought for himself, but done it with peculiar pomp and pride; he would consider himself the freest of all freethinkers.  Let us take him as a type and a test of what has really happened to Huxley’s analysis of the gold and the dross.  Huxley quoted as the indestructible ideal the noble passage in Micah, beginning “He hath shewed thee, O man, that which is good”; and asked scornfully whether anybody was ever likely to suggest that justice was worthless or that mercy was unlovable, and whether anything would diminish the distance between ourselves and the ideals that we reverence.  And yet already, perhaps, Mr. George Moore was anticipating Nietzsche, sailing near, as he said, “the sunken rocks about the cave of Zarathustra.”  He said, if I remember right, that Cromwell should be admired for his injustice.  He implied that Christ should be condemned, not because he destroyed the swine, but because he delivered the sick.  In short he found justice quite worthless and mercy quite unlovable; and as for humility and the distance between himself and his ideals, he seemed rather to suggest (at this time at least) that his somewhat varying ideals were only interesting because they had belonged to himself.  Some of this, it is true, was only in the Confessions of a Young Man; but it is the whole point here that they were then the confessions of a young man, and that Huxley’s in comparison were the confessions of an old man.  The trend of the new time, in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merely the Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology, not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christian ethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secure as the stars.

But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed, it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked.  The next phase of Mr. George Moore himself, whom I have taken as a type of the time, was the serious and sympathetic consideration of Irish mysticism, as embodied in Mr. W. B. Yeats.  I have myself heard Mr. Yeats, about that time, tell a story, to illustrate how concrete and even comic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knew a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten.