Getting Married | Page 8

the
Bible off by heart; and this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness,
mischievous as it was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the
child did not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have
been by transports of sentimentality.
But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they
were. We no longer have large families: all the families are too small to
give the children the necessary social training. The Roman father is out
of fashion; and the whip and the cane are becoming discredited, not so
much by the old arguments against corporal punishment (sound as
these were) as by the gradual wearing away of the veil from the fact
that flogging is a form of debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a
punishment is now exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever
since Rousseau rose to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous
confession on the subject, there has been a growing perception that
child whipping, even for the children themselves, is not always the
innocent and high-minded practice it professes to be. At all events there
is no getting away from the facts that families are smaller than they
used to be, and that passions which formerly took effect in tyranny
have been largely diverted into sentimentality. And though a little
sentimentality may be a very good thing, chronic sentimentality is a
horror, more dangerous, because more possible, than the erotomania
which we all condemn when we are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as
the ideal married state.
THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA
Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic doctrines. Why
was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a conviction that increased with
his experience of life, preached the gospel of Laodicea, urging people

to be temperate in what they called goodness as in everything else?
Why is it that I, when I hear some well-meaning person exhort young
people to make it a rule to do at least one kind action every day, feel
very much as I should if I heard them persuade children to get drunk at
least once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity of accepting as
permanent a state of things in which there would be in this country
misery enough to supply occasion for several thousand million kind
actions per annum, the effect on the character of the doers of the
actions would be so appalling, that one month of any serious attempt to
carry out such counsels would probably bring about more stringent
legislation against actions going beyond the strict letter of the law in
the way of kindness than we have now against excess in the opposite
direction.
There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing that
we cannot have too much of a good thing. The truth is, an
immoderately good man is very much more dangerous than an
immoderately bad man: that is why Savonarola was burnt and John of
Leyden torn to pieces with red-hot pincers whilst multitudes of
unredeemed rascals were being let off with clipped ears, burnt palms, a
flogging, or a few years in the galleys. That is why Christianity never
got any grip of the world until it virtually reduced its claims on the
ordinary citizen's attention to a couple of hours every seventh day, and
let him alone on week-days. If the fanatics who are preoccupied day in
and day out with their salvation were healthy, virtuous, and wise, the
Laodiceanism of the ordinary man might be regarded as a deplorable
shortcoming; but, as a matter of fact, no more frightful misfortune
could threaten us than a general spread of fanaticism. What people call
goodness has to be kept in check just as carefully as what they call
badness; for the human constitution will not stand very much of either
without serious psychological mischief, ending in insanity or crime.
The fact that the insanity may be privileged, as Savonarola's was up to
the point of wrecking the social life of Florence, does not alter the case.
We always hesitate to treat a dangerously good man as a lunatic
because he may turn out to be a prophet in the true sense: that is, a man
of exceptional sanity who is in the right when we are in the wrong.
However necessary it may have been to get rid of Savonarola, it was
foolish to poison Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the

less necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous proposition
that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and
admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be maintained
at the same pitch continuously through life. A life spent in prayer and
alms giving