my youth) why Christendom called the soul the bride of God.  For real love is an intense realisation of the “separateness” of all our souls.  The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world is never mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a melting back into Nature, a meeting of the waters.  And water is plunging and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill.  The high and human love-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the great love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the same instant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger.

For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and if we grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realised in what we differ.  That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and the Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and the East.  There were many other differences, calculated to arrest even the superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon.  But the essential difference was simply this:  that the Dragon did want to eat St. George; whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the Dragon.  In most of the stories he killed the Dragon.  In many of the stories he not only spared, but baptised it.  But in neither case did the Christian have any appetite for cold dragon.  The Dragon, however, really has an appetite for cold Christian—­and especially for cold Christianity.  This blind intention to absorb, to change the shape of everything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon’s stomach; this is what is really meant by the Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East.  The Cosmos as such is cannibal; as old Time ate his children.  The Eastern saints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up.  The Western saint, like St. George, was sainted by the Western Church precisely because he refused to be swallowed.  The same process of thought that has prevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented the complete appearance of Pantheism.  All Christian men instinctively resist the idea of being absorbed into an Empire; an Austrian, a Spanish, a British, or a Turkish Empire.  But there is one empire, much larger and much more tyrannical, which free men will resist with even stronger passion.  The free man violently resists being absorbed into the empire which is called the Universe.  He demands Home Rule for his nationality, but still more Home Rule for his home.  Most of all he demands Home Rule for himself.  He claims the right to be saved, in spite of Moslem fatalism.  He claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophical optimism.  He refuses to be the Cosmos; because he refuses to forget it.

THE MUMMER

The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so close that they might as well have been inside the house instead of just outside; so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seem farther away.  Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, who come every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of the old Christmas play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the Very Venal Doctor.  I will not describe it; it is indescribable; but I will describe my parallel sentiments as it passed.