His “simple” meals, his “simple” clothes, his “simple” funeral, are all extolled as if they were creditable to him.  They are disgraceful to him:  exactly as disgraceful as the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him.  To be in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint; to be in rags for money was that of a filthy old fool.  Precisely in the same way, to be “simple” for charity is the state of a saint; to be “simple” for money is that of a filthy old fool.  Of the two I have more respect for the old miser, gnawing bones in an attic:  if he was not nearer to God, he was at least a little nearer to men.  His simple life was a little more like the life of the real poor.

THE MYSTAGOGUE

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay.  It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech.  But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made.  If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea.  If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelieo would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him.  And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him in some way.  That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist.  The trend of good is always towards Incarnation.  But, on the other hand, those refined thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination.  They call him “horror of emptiness,” as did the black witch in Stevenson’s Dynamiter; they worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence.  They think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless corridors of nightmare.  It was the Christians who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail.  It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively.  The Satanists never drew him at all.