the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the
body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is
diseased. It is the drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is
marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him.

Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid
pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the
real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of
the nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was
horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the
plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was
lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of
modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never
dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a
new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence
which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of
calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes
down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,
whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not
either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. What
disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear
realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine
religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the
contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing
that called names. This is the great difference between some recent
developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the
seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they
cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish
themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which
the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at
kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke
plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly
about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly
resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is
that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things
increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what
things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it
goes almost