specially
strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can only
be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all the
current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man is
seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive,
it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses of
his mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiled
and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces,
the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental
honesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of
pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strength
of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quite
positive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinary
as conjuring. The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a man
happy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make me
happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the
street?" The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not
prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as to
suppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, strongly
suggest, was that something had entered human psychology which was
stronger than strong pain. If a young girl, scourged and bleeding to
death, saw nothing but a crown descending on her from God, the first
mental step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that she was
certainly feeding on something. But this particular point of psychology
does not arise at all in the modern cases of mere public discomfort or
inconvenience. The causes of Miss Pankhurst's cheerfulness require no
mystical explanations. If she were being burned alive as a witch, if she
then looked up in unmixed rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out of
heaven, then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive, was
frightfully impressive. It would not prove logically that she ought to
have the vote, or that anybody ought to have the vote. But it would
prove this: that there was, for some reason, a sacramental reality in
the vote, that the soul could take the vote and feed on it; that it was
in itself a positive and overpowering pleasure, capable of being pitted
against positive and overpowering pain.

I should advise modern agitators, therefore, to give up this particular
method: the method of