he has no personal existence now.  He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool.  I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child’s mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.  I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes.  They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.  We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other.  But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other?  He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God.  He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.  He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt.  Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear.  They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense.  They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it?  They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia.  They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men.  With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here.  With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall and Snelgrove.  Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion.  The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.  The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

CHAPTER IX.—­Authority and the Adventurer

The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and advance.  If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.  If we want to uproot inherent