Heretics | Page 5

independent testimony. The modern idea is that
cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says.
The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees
inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never has
there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when,
for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old restriction meant that
only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty
means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and
vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all
the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed

atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last
men who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste
to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just this-- that
now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. Emancipation has
only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the heresiarch.
Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather, and call it the
complete liberty of all the creeds.
But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them-- who
think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his
view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger,
it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his
philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is
important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to
know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the
theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run,
anything else affects them. In the fifteenth century men cross-examined
and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in
the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he
preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude
because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two
methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which
was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the
disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very
same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a
convict for practising.
Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about
ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from
two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate
literature. They have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's sake."
General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven out by
the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as "politics for
politics' sake." Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order
or liberty have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and
eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely
become less political; politics have purposely become less literary.

General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from
both; and we are in a position to ask, "What have we gained or lost by
this extrusion? Is literature better, is politics better, for having
discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"
When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and
ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's
body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health.
Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man
than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And
there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation
than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a
journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There can be no
stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to run after
high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry
for the moon. None of the strong men in the strong ages would have
understood what you meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand
would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for the
Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not for
efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even if the ideal of
such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man