a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible.  After a like manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism on the other.

[Footnote 13:  Analects, XI, CXI; VI, CXX.]

For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which self-control has most chance of succeeding.  Hence here, as elsewhere on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.

To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves.  It is the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we referred in the first lecture.  The naturalist, you may remember, is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law unto himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole universe.  He perversely identifies discipline with repression and makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct.  Oscar Wilde’s epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples of a thoroughgoing naturalist’s insolent indifference to any form of restraint.  All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination.  No humanistic law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him as a restraining force or a selective principle.  An immediate and significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the film dramas of the moving picture houses.  Unreal extravagance of imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral judgment, frequently distinguishes them.  In screenland, it is the vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child, who reign almost undisputed.  Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans, attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality.  Opposed to them, in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who stand for the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; the judge, the policeman, the mere husband.  These pitiable and laughable figures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, in any primitive society, they so richly deserve!