Whats Wrong With The World | Page 8

is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Church
of England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only
question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while
in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a
fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend
gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they
will admit. Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It
is merely concealed, like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological
atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr.
Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly
for Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, one
hopes, imaginative enough to recognize the dignity and distinctness of
another religion, like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite ready to
respect another man's faith; but it is too much to ask that I should
respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political
bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for
English history could see something poetic and national about the
Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when
he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get
annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could
admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is
simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him.
But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument
that used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it
saved us from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary,
it creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself.
This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's
attention to it with a little more precision.
Some people do not like the word "dogma." Fortunately they are free,
and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two
things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle
Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a
poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a

prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should
not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should
be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a
direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have
the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general
recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel
must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might
walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and
one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away
from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our
modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed
unites men--so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many
a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been
nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two
homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is
One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a
good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these
creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow
multiplicity as such (because it was his "temperament"), and he would
turn up later with three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity.
Meanwhile, it would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful
intellectual fall. It would force that previously healthy person not only
to admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody
else. When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of
his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again; the Christian a
Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more
unfit to understand each other than before.
It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men,
it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear
weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can
walk up to the very edge of