nfinitely less
than that of spiritual pride, of which he had really been guilty.

The High Plains

By high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interest
one very much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without the
pleasure of a peak. Also they arc vaguely associated with Asia and those
enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts, as did the army
of Xerxes; with emperors from nowhere spreading their battalions
everywhere; with the white elephants and the painted horses, the dark
engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the moving empires of the
East, with all that evil insolence in short that rolled into Europe in
the youth of Nero, and after having been battered about and abandoned by
one Christian nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeli
and was christened (or rather paganed) Imperialism.

Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean "high planes" such
as the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about. They
spell theirs differently; but I will not have theirs in any spelling.
They, I know, are always expounding how this or that person is on a
lower plane, while they (the speakers) are on a higher plane: sometimes
they will almost tell you what plane, as "5994" or "Plane F, sub-plane
304." I do not mean this sort of height either. My religion says nothing
about such planes except that all men are on one plane and that by no
means a high one. There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saint
only means a man who really knows he is a sinner.

Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a rather
singular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at
school learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was puzzled by
the phrase OINON MELAN that is "black wine," which continually occurred.
I asked what it meant, and many most interesting and convincing answers
were given. It was pointed out that we know little of the actual liquid
drunk by the Greeks; that the analogy of modern Greek wines may suggest
that it was dark and sticky, perhaps a sort of syrup always taken with
water; that archaic language about colour is always a little dubious, as
where Homer speaks of the "wine-dark sea" and so on. I was very properly
satisfied, and never thought of the matter again; until one day, having
a decanter of claret in front of me, I happened to look at it. I then
perceived that they called wine black because it is black. Very