crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. For
no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently
as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire
very bad and unnatural things.

Most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar
complication, very beautiful or necessary things are in some
danger . . .

. . . And when something is set before mankind that is not only
enormously valuable, but also quite new, the sudden vision, the
chance of winning it, the chance of losing it, drive them mad. It has
the same effect in the moral world that the finding of gold has in
the economic world. It upsets values, and creates a kind of cruel
rush.

We need not go far for instances quite apart from the instances of
religion. When the modern doctrines of brotherhood and liberality
were preached in France in the eighteenth century the time was ripe
for them, the educated classes everywhere had been growing towards
them, the world to a very considerable extent welcomed them. And yet
all that preparation and openness were unable to prevent the burst of
anger and agony which greets anything good. And if the slow and
polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in
the massacres of September, what an _a fortiori_ is here! What would
be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully
evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth? What would happen if a
world baser than the world of Sade were confronted with a gospel
purer than the gospel of Rousseau?

The mere flinging of the polished pebble of Republican idealism
into the artificial lake of eighteenth century Europe produced a
splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned
ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell
into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity?
Men swept a city with the guillotine, a continent with a sabre,
because Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were too precious to be
lost. How if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet
more precious?

But why should we labour the point when One who knew human nature
as it can really be learnt, from fishermen and women and natural
people, saw from his quiet village the track of this truth across
history, and, in saying that He came to bring n