spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all
this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His
Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could
not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a
martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational,
though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by
a lion in one's own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.

It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has
inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars
have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked
and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange
world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame,
if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves
and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at
sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds
flew, like bats, by night.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE

There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown
from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical
phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown
in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is 'the heir of all
the ages' is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally
important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is
not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good
for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling
doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding
childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and
inventive in any age; and if w