an embittered woman
actually in answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions are
simply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth. Yet though he
can be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of the
story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is the
paradox of mediaeval morals: as it must appear to the moderns. We must
try to conceive a race of men who hated John, and sought his blood, and
believed every abomination about him, who would have been quite capable
of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger. And
yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally
surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goods
to the poor, embraced the lepers in a lazar-house, and been canonised
as a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Will
should turn freely, which now is rusted, and sticks.

For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of our
public men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is a
noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admit
that he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with the
powerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and
rabid Socialist, maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expect
him to go on maddening them—and us. We do not expect him, let
us say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea of
repentance; especially in public things; that is why we cannot
really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and
aristocratic avarice. Progress in the modern sense is a very dismal
drudge; and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move on
because we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets,
the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings,
they did not confine themselves to saying, "Onward, Christian soldiers,"
still less, "Onward, Futurist soldiers"; what they said to high emperors
and to whole empires was, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?"

THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there
are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to
most modern books. A detective story generally describes six living
men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story
generally describes six dead men discussing how any man