ll the charm of abounding life and
abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and literally
mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to superhuman guidance, or
at least to some reasoned system of morals. When it became apparent to
the cleverest of them that no such superhuman guidance existed, and
that their secularist systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation"
without its poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the
good that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well as
all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if progress were
a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining on his destructive
ones. It was under the influence of these ideas that we began to hear
about the joy of life where we had formerly heard about the grace of God
or the Age of Reason, and that the boldest spirits began to raise the
question whether churches and laws and the like were not doing a great
deal more harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in revelation
was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of thought led the
strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man's private judgment
was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the
Church. This was called Protestantism; and though the Protestants were
not strong enough for their creed, and soon set up a Church of their
own, yet the movement, on the whole, has justified the direction it
took. Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished;
and if every man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)
Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism.
Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable new
creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory is
its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There is no such
thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude of
men, some of them great rascals, some of them greet statesmen, others
both, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs,
but no