llowed to discuss it. Good taste, the
last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us
where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be
an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men,
the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is
still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved
just his--that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as
the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather, and
call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.

But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them--who
think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still
his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a
lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to
know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an
enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more
important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not
whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the
long run, anything else affects them. In the fifteenth century men
cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral
attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde
because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal
servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the
two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which
was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the
disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very
same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict
for practising.

Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about
ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from
two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate
literature. They have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's
sake." General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven
out by the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as
"politics for politics' sake." Persistently for the last twenty years
the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the
ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our pa