all her name.

CHAPTER III.--_The Suicide of Thought_

The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure
of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases
like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by Mr. Henry James
in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than
that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right
place." It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a
certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions.
Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar
accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most
representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with
fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself
more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous
heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical
society of our time.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too
good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is
shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not
merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose,
and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and
the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The
virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other
and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their
truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their
pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr.
Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian
virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He
has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying
that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early
Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been
eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his
mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human
race--because he is so human. As the other extreme, we may take the
acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure
in happy tales or in the healing of the heart.