tice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality.
Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord
Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch--the man who
is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than
any theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of
worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether
this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause
is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough
to make it succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should
abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf
because he was beaten at golf. There is nothing which is so weak for
working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate
victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

And having discovered that opportunism does fail, I have been induced
to look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must
fail. I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the
beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each
other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than
the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the
Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and
trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our
modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty
without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If
the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously
took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern
mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine
without even stating it.

For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have come to believe in
going back to fundamentals. Such is the general idea of this book. I
wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries, not personally
or in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of
doctrine which they teach. I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling
as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as
a Heretic--that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood
to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one
of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am
concerned with him as a Heretic-