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(p. 134)
THE fate of
(p. 135)
faculty in excess, and another the other
faculty; but all have both in varying proportions; and botch faculties ought to
be cultivated with like industry. The reason why it is almost vain in our day to
appeal to men’s intuitions is that the whole regime of modern society is ordered
with an express view to the destruction of the intuitional faculty; and hence it
has come that an appeal to moral considerations is now addressed to deaf ears.
Interest, as divorced from and opposed to duty, almost alone has a chance of
gaining an audience. This has held hood alike of the individual and of the
general, until it has come that the only consideration that a statesman dares
address to the country is that of “the interests of England” – a phrase
invariably interpreted to mean her material, as distinguished from her moral,
welfare.
Those in whom the heart is sound, in that the intuitive faculty is still kept
alive, will recognise the accuracy of the description which represents the two
classes respectively as men who stand one at the summit and the other at the
base of a mighty hill: the former, aloft in pure, clear, bracing airs, through
which his vision can reach to distances impossible at a lower altitude; the
latter, enveloped in the mists and clouds which hang around the sides and
envelop in obscurity the
(p. 136)
dwellers in the valleys, so that men are
forced to grope in darkness or with such artificial lights as they may devise,
in order to find aught that they may require. The mountain is not so lofty but
that words can be exchanged between those at its extremities; and loud and
ringing is the voice with which the climber at the summit hails his friends
below, entreating them to escape from the darkness and stifling fogs of the
valley. “Here, at the level on which I stand,” he cries,” is no mist or cloud to
intercept the view. The atmosphere is preternaturally clear, and the air, oh, so
exhilarating and bracing! The sun, of which you never catch a glimpse, shines
out bright and warm up here, and marches through the skies with a grand and
stately tread, lighting up all the land as he goes, and shining directly into
myself, vivifying and renewing my whole being. Only come and see for yourselves.
Come and see how gloriously beautiful is existence, when one has found the right
place and the right light for beholding it. Never, before I carne up here, did I
know what it is to live and to be a MAN. Oh, glorious sun! Surely thou art the
brightness of the glory and the express image of the person of Him, the great
Triune – at once producer, sustainer, and
(p. 137)
renewer of existence! Surely it is no
idolatry to adore thee as His representative and vicegerent, and to call thee
also a God!”
Hearing his accents of enthusiasm ringing loud and clear through the mists, the
grovellers below listen, wondering what there can be up on those barren peaks
thus to excite him. Looking in the direction whence the sounds proceed, they see
nothing save the rolling roof of darkness that hangs over them. “Poor fellow,”
they remark to each other, “he was always of an excitable temperament, and the
air up there must have quite turned his head. It will be fortunate if be gets
down safe, and in time for supper.”
In answer to his renewed
entreaties to come up and see for themselves – for his sympathies are vivid, and
a solitary pleasure is to him only half a pleasure – they declare that they do
not believe a word he says. He may not mean to deceive, but every one knows how
deceptive the atmosphere is apt to be at those unaccustomed heights. If he could
enable them to see it for themselves from where they are, it would be a
different thing; or perhaps if some of them, whose imagination could be trusted
not to run away with them, were to come up on behalf of the others, it might be
managed – but then it must
(p. 138)
be stipulated that they bring some of their
valley fog with them. They dare not trust themselves out of that. It is the
breath and life of their being.
The pleas whereon the two orthodox classes respectively rest their case, are
essentially one and the same. One is, that man, though once good, is totally
depraved, and therefore incapable of seeing aright without priestly assistance;
and the other, that man is only an educated beast, incapable of seeing at all,
and able only to grope his way by the aid of his senses. As a beast, it has been
argued lately, man belongs to Nature; Nature is cruel; wherefore man is insolent
and presumptions when, by claiming to be superior to the beasts, he claims to be
better than Nature. Thus is ignored the evidence of man’s whole history, to the
effect that the world is intended, not as a final perfection, but as a place for
the education of the consciousness, and a brief stage in the education of the
individual – an education of which the possibility is inconceivable in the
absence of the ministry of pain. Orthodoxy, speaking by the mouth of the
physiologist and the biologist, virtually teaches that because the Master of the
school of the world is sometimes compelled to employ severe measures, therefore
the pupils are justified in torturing each other.
(p. 139)
But granting that man is only an “educated beast,” what do we, what do physiologists, I ask again, know about beasts? Can they tell us aught about the basis and nature of consciousness? Of that of beasts any more than of ourselves? If, as is indisputably the case, all consciousness is essentially one, and all life, all mind, all existence is one; and if, as is also indisputably the case, the end of existence is, for everything to which existence has been given, the fulfilment and development of its own allotment of consciousness; and if also, as would seem to follow from the eternity of the life of the whole, the life of the individual is indestructible, – if all this be so, then it is not man that is lowered, but the beast that is raised by the comparison, inasmuch as we are thereby compelled to regard it as but an uneducated, perchance a degenerated, man.
The correspondence subsisting
between the religious and scientific orthodoxies, in respect to the various
stages of development of the doctrine of vicarious sacrifices, is curious and
instructive. In both the earliest for m is botanical. In religion man offers
innocent gifts of fruits and flowers in token of thankfulness to, and perhaps
not without expectation of future favours from, his Maker; for it has always
been the belief of
(p. 140)
primitive peoples that their gods really
require and subsist upon the food offered to them in sacrifice. This stage
corresponds to that which in science consists in the dissection and
microscopical examination of plants, for the purpose of learning their
structure, and comparing it with that of man.
Passing beyond this stage, man sacrifices in religion sheep and oxen; and in
science, the invertebrate animals, in which, owing to the rudimentary nature of
their nervous systems, there is supposed to be but little faculty of sensation.
But the institution has now
reached a stage at which blood has been tasted on both sides, the softer
feelings are blunted, and the parties have become accustomed to the notion that
man can in some way be benefited by the death and sufferings of the inferior
animals. And it is argued that if by the death and sufferings of the inferior
animals he obtains benefit, much more will he do so by those of a higher grade.
Reflecting thus, the lower human consciousness, religious and scientific, shows
itself ripe for a new development in the idea of sacrifice.
People who believe in the soul have never been over-careful of the body. The value of the
(p. 141)
latter vanishes in view of the supreme
importance of the former. Priests have not been slow to take advantage of this
magnificent trait in the character of man. It has always been enough for them to
represent that it was of use to give of the fruit of the body for the sin of the
soul, in order to obtain the flower of a country’s youth and beauty for the
sacrificial altar. The step from animals to man, when the priests declared that
no sacrifice short of one of such a character would propitiate the gods, was
therefore effected without difficulty; and with such universal success, that it
is impossible to point to a single nation of all those mentioned in history that
did not offer human sacrifices. The logic of sacrifice having once been
conceded, and vicarious atonement having become the orthodox and only way of
salvation, it was easily seen that no animal short of the sinning animal, man,
could atone for man.
Thus far the victory remains with
the sacerdotalists; for the physiologists, through the comparative lukewarmness
of mankind where the body only is concerned, were unable to achieve the next
stage in the development of their branch of the sacrificial idea. They have been
compelled, therefore, for the most part, to be content with
(p. 142)
experimenting upon the most highly organised
and sensitive animals, next to man, that they could obtain. Of course these
were, by the very fact of their superior organisation and intelligence, man’s
especial companions and friends – namely, cats, dogs, horses, and monkeys. The
monkey has an especial attraction for the vivisecting physiologist, because of
the exact resemblance of his brain to that of man. His antics, moreover, under
torture, are found pleasantly to vary the monotony of a dry scientific
exposition, as any one will find who takes the trouble to refer to the published
records of such matters. For the vivisector’s humour is of the grimmest. After
destroying with a red-hot wire the nerve of sight in a monkey’s brain, and
paralysing one side of the animal, Professor Ferrier says of the application of
a hot iron to the other side, that “active reaction ensued.” A contortion of
agony is usually described as indicating “a great sensory stimulus.” The facts,
we are told, are differently interpreted by experimenters. But even monkeys are
a poor substitute for men, when it is a knowledge of man, for man, that is
required. Only a few cases, however, are on record in which living human
subjects have been experimented upon for the benefit of science the earliest
instance I have
(p. 143)
been able to find is that of the Chinese
emperor, Chow-sin, the last king of the dynasty Chang, who lived about B.C.
1700, and was therefore a contemporary of the Hebrew Joseph. The experiments
performed by Chow-sin consisted in ripping up pregnant women in order that he
might see the fetus in the womb; an experiment of a class frequently performed
by physiologists in our days on animals about to give birth to young. Another
experiment of Chow-sin’s contained a facetious element, which marked him a model
vivisector. Seeing some people fording a river one very cold morning in winter,
he remarked that they must have very good constitutions to bear the cold so
well, and then ordered their legs to be chopped off, that he might view the
marrow. Chow-sin, however, became, as the Rev. Dr. Morrison assures us, a
synonym in
There is a passage in an old Latin
medical writer (I think Celsus) which is instructive in relation to this
subject. After naming two of his predecessors who had vivisected men, he
remarks, “For my part, I never experiment on anything that is alive; for I
regard science as intended to cure, and not to cause, suffering.”
Religion has been more
fortunate both as regards
(p. 144)
the willingness of its people, if not as
regards the zeal of its priests. The descriptions given by recent travellers of
human sacrifices in
While the sacrifice of ordinary
men continued with unabated vigour, the feeling that something above an ordinary
man – something that would include and cover all mankind – obtained favour with
the priesthoods, especially of the nations in and about Canaan. The sacrifice of
the son or daughter of a king or chief was thus regarded as possessing especial
efficacy. The Hebrew sacerdotalists, to inculcate this belief, ascribed great
merit to Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac.
(p. 145)
And notwithstanding that Abraham was
restrained by an intuition of the wickedness of the practice, the Divine
approval was represented as accorded to the intention, and to the alleged
substitution of a ram, instead of to the patriarch’s faithfulness to his
intuitions. When Mesha, king of
Having reached the summit of the
ladder of material life, and sacrificed the highest in the land without gaining
thereby any abatement of the evils by which the earth was afflicted – for it was
no business of the priests to tell people that they must lead more wholesome and
industrious
(p. 146)
lives in order that by affording no
provocation to plague, famine, or war, they might themselves minister to the
prevention of their misfortunes; – that might have had the effect of leading
them to suspect that they could dispense with the services of the priests
altogether – it occurred to men that it must be the soul and not the body that
was responsible for the evils of existence; hence it became necessary to find
some means of sacrificing a soul or spirit instead of a body only. The
conception, first of a man-god, and next of a god-man, afforded the desired
solution; and as it was not possible to go beyond the sacrifice of a god, men
were forced to be content. The world, it is true, was not rescued from its
evils; and so the only resource was to suppose that it was beyond redemption,
and to go on letting the priests have their way lest worse things befall.
I said that the physiologists were
not yet at the end of their resources. True, their disbelief in the existence of
souls precluded them from desiring to include a soul in the list of animals
liable to vivisection; but there is one very favourite experiment of which the
significance ought not to be unheeded. This is the practice of inoculating
unsuspecting patients with the disease known as syphilis, for the benefit of
(p. 147)
science. Seeing that it is a characteristic
of this disease, generally believed to be incurable, to be liable to taint the
blood of whole successive generations, and produce diseases of the most dreadful
kind, mental as well as physical, it is hardly too much to say that science has
run sacerdotalism hard in the competition which has now lasted at least two
thousand years.
It is scarcely necessary to say
that neither class of sacrificialists has been more successful than the other in
preventing or relieving the woes of humanity. On the contrary, impiety, crime,
and disease are constantly showing themselves under new and more aggravated
forms. This result is only what an unprejudiced observer, suspecting the
existence in the world of some degree of moral government, and watching for
tokens of its operation, would have expected. For the prevalence of the notion
that their clergy and doctors were really taking the best means to save them,
has prevented people from giving their own attention to the matter, and thereby
withheld them from seeking a radical cause or cure for their maladies of
whatever kind. Even now the world is not aware of the fact that everything that
comes to be made a trade of, and to be associated with the element of pecuniary
gain, is
(p. 148)
apt to deteriorate, and this in respect of
the quality of the thing itself no less than of the class of persons who occupy
themselves with it. Founded originally in enthusiasm, the noblest activities
degenerate when made a matter of trade.
The orthodoxies cannot be expected
to betray any misgiving that their whole principle of procedure is wrong, either
as a matter of morals, or as a matter of therapeutics. The two businesses have
grown up into enormous vested interests, with all sorts of grades of honour and
merit, and with every kind of paraphernalia that can make a solemn show before
the people. Like the famous religious “mysteries” of antiquity, they have their
own codes for regulating the conduct of their members towards each other and the
public, and their own terms of admission into their respective bodies, and their
doctrines esoteric and exoteric. The sacerdotal order will not, for instance,
admit any candidate to its ranks who openly announces his disbelief in the
efficacy of vicarious sacrifice; and the Royal Society – for the patronage of
the Crown is not withheld – refuses to admit any medical man to membership
unless he can produce proofs of practical proficiency in the art of vivisection.
At the last meeting of
this Society, its
(p. 149)
president, the distinguished botanist, Dr.
Hooker, announced a donation of £6000 for the encouragement among us of original
research in the physical sciences, and the proposal of the Government to add for
the next five years £4000 annually to the present grant of £1000, which the
Society expends chiefly in “providing investigators with instruments and
assistance.” He described the course taken by the council in the matter of
vivisection, and “its earnest remonstrance against the admission into the
statute book of a principle essentially antagonistic to the progress of all
natural knowledge.”
I hope I am succeeding in making it understood what our orthodoxies really are,
and what chance our honour and safety as a people have in their hands. It is by
the tone and capacity of its intellectual classes that the true condition of a
people must first be judged, as a soil must be judged by the character of its
vegetation, a tree by its fruit. If our men and our principles are worthless for
home use, they are worthless for exportation. If they mislead us and bring us to
grief in our own affairs, they will do so where the affairs of others are
concerned. The instinctive intuition of the true, the right, and the noble gone,
it will be gone for one set of affairs as well as for another. At home we are in
the depth of a spiritual winter.
(p. 150)
Let us carry that winter abroad, as we are
called on by the orthodoxies to do, and the consequences both for ourselves and
for mankind will be nought but weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
To understand from what I have said of the orthodox scientific spirit, that I am
a hater of science, or from what I have said of the orthodox religious spirit
that I am no lover of religion, would be wholly to mistake the meaning of all
that I have said. It is to the religion and science of the idea of which our present orthodoxies
are degradations that I look for the final consummation of man’s high destiny.
To me it is no reproach to a man to be called idealist, and unpractical. On the
contrary, I regard the truest idealist as the most practical of men, for he is
the one man who dispenses neither with facts, nor with the meaning of facts. I
can point to scientists of the highest repute, the coming men of the scientific
hopes of the future, who rave with indignant contempt if any one ventures in
their presence to hint that the facts, to collect which they are sacrificing
both the bodies of others and their own souls – such atrocious barbarities do
they freely practise in satisfaction of the most aimless curiosity – have any
meaning, or relation to each other. “Science consists,” say
(p. 151)
these model specimens of scientific
orthodoxy, “in gathering and cataloguing facts, not in seeking to interpret
them; since there is no interpretation to them, but everything in existence is
accident and confusion. There is no sun to the system, no centre round which it
revolves in harmonious and sympathetic order. Man, the world, the whole universe
of being, are but the unmeaning vibrations of some unknown, unknowable medium,
and he who thinks otherwise is an idealist and a fool.” Such be thy scientific
gods, O England! and O Christendom!
Is further argument needed to
prove that it is not the soul but the body of England; not her higher but her
lower nature; not the once warm, generous heart that would dare and suffer any
risk to save a fellow-being from oppression and cruelty; but a debased,
over-fed, sensual, faithless, selfish body, through which her soul can by no
means penetrate, and that prompts her to be indifferent alike to every principle
of honour and humanity – whether she be called on by priests to defame her God
by regarding Him as incapable of granting pardon to His own creatures without a
sacrifice of blood; or by scientists to disgrace herself by consenting at their
bidding and in their interests to sanction
(p. 152)
the infliction of torture upon myriads of
defenceless animals; or whether, at the bidding of both of those classes, to
commit the monstrous folly and wrong of authorising the chief priests and
Pharisees of her National Church to immolate on the altar, whereat they seek to
celebrate their proposed unnatural union with the miserable Greek fetish
worship, a people she has ever protected, and whose welfare is bound up with her
own highest interests. For this is, in plain English, the secret and motive of
the whole conspiracy. It is for this that Mr. Gladstone has long and carefully
watched and planned; it is for this that he has sought to rouse the country to
frenzy against deeds which were even more the misfortune than the crime of the
Turk, and more the crime of Russia than that of the Turk; it is for this that
his every public utterance is skillfully devised; and it is for this that in the
very latest manifesto from his pen he incites Greece to rise in arms,
unprovoked, against her neighbour, and thus to cut the throat of its own
independence by facilitating the approach of Russia to its shores.
Have I not said enough to show
that orthodoxy is always cruel? That it must always have blood? Blood to save
the soul; blood to save the body;
(p. 153)
and now blood to cement the union of two
Churches which are much better apart: just as if we Englishmen really believed
in human sacrifice, and held it to be “expedient that one man should die for the
nation.”
Where, it must be asked, is the
generosity, where the scrupulous conscientiousness of that naturally large and
sympathetic mind that it can thus stoop to a base intrigue with a knot of
sacerdotalists? The answer is at once a deathblow to the whole joint fabric and
compact of orthodoxy and atheism. It has come to this because it has suffered
its ideal of the Divine perfection to be befouled by a false and hideous
doctrine. Mr. Gladstone has yet to learn that as a single flaw in a diamond
destroys the value of the gem, so a single flaw in our conception of the ideal
perfection vitiates our whole system of thought and conduct. Man is practically
what he conceives God to be. If we do not recognise perfection in Him, we cannot
attain, or even aspire to it in ourselves. For the believer in the sacerdotal
doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, God is not synonymous with perfection,
intellectual, moral, or physical. He represents the blind, relentless WILL of
the pessimist, whose might is right, and than whom, he conceives, man has no
better
(p. 154)
exemplar. Earth is no longer to be a school
wherein to develop man’s lower consciousness into his higher. But henceforth all
things are to be regarded from the standpoint of the outer and apparent self,
and the soul is to be sacrificed to the supposed exigences of the body. And so
the ineffable tragedy of the Soul enacted on
In thus making the body the
central standpoint from which to regard existence and formulate doctrines for
its ordering, orthodoxy, alike in the sphere of religion, morals, and science,
demonstrates that for it Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton have lived in vain, and
that the sun still moves round the earth as its source and centre; that the sun
and planets, and the whole stellar universe, are but offshoots and accidents of
the earth, instead of the earth being itself but a satellite deriving its
existence from the sun, and dependent on it for the means of enjoying that
existence. Little doubt can there be that if orthodoxy, religious or scientific,
would but reconsider the sentence it pronounced against Bruno, Vanini, and
Galileo, and try for once to see what aspect the universe bears when viewed from
its true centre, instead of
(p. 155)
continuing to blazon forth the antiquated
teaching that the earth is the true self and centre of the solar system, and the
sun but a pleasant illusion; that the body is the true self and centre of the
human system, and the soul an illusion; and that it is all a mistake to suppose
that there is a vivid and luminous centre from which the body of man or earth
radiates; or that sun or soul is aught else than the outcome of the material
envelope of the earthly sense – it would find just cause for holding down its
head in bitterest shame.
The secret conclave of the Vatican
well knew that the demonstration on the physical plane to the world of the truth
long before perceived on the spiritual plane – the truth that the sun, and not
the earth; the spirit, and not the body; God, and not man, is the true centre
and self of each respective system – would when generally recognised in all its
significance, be fatal to the whole fabric of the superstition whereby they
throve. It was not the outward and astronomical, but the inward and spiritual
truth that they strove to quench. For their fundamental dogma of a God redeeming
by his death instead of by his life, was not likely long to survive the
discovery that God’s vicegerent and representative to earth, the sun, undergoes
no real death,
(p. 156)
notwithstanding his decline and apparent
obscuration, but shines on, ever the same, undimmed and undying, giving light
and life to all, without money and without price; and that when we lose his
light, it is because we turn away or hide from him, and not because he turns
away or hides from us.
It is through the failure of Mr.
Gladstone and his colleagues, religious or scientific, to accord a practical
recognition to this discovery, that they persist in viewing all things from the
standpoint of the body, and seek to reproduce the sacrifices founded on the
notion of a dying God. And it is through the resolve of sacerdotalism to turn to
its own advantage the sacrifice consummated at the instigation of Caiaphas, by
pretending that it was by the death so criminally inflicted upon Christ, and not
by His life of self-sacrifice, that He constituted so potent an element in human
redemption, – that we are now called on to repeat the deed.
The soul is crucified whenever its
counsels are rejected for those of the body, and that is whenever orthodoxy,
sacerdotal or other, seeks to procure its own lower ends by the sacrifice of
another. An unthinking multitude, meaning well, but not seeing very far, may
shout, “Not this man but Barabbas.” The chief priests and
(p. 157)
Pharisees, all the art, science, and
respectability of the nation may be in accord with them – not, however, for the
national good, but for some secret interest, such as, perchance, the advancement
of some favourite ecclesiastical project, some new development of sacerdotalism,
which they would on no account disclose to the vulgar and uninitiated – but the
end will always be the soul’s crucifixion instead of the body’s purgation. And
England’s soul will be crucified should the counsels of Mr, Gladstone prevail,
and Turkey be handed over to the tender mercies of Russia, merely to enable two
ambitious sacerdotalisms, which have failed to find their own true centre, to
escape the consequences of their adherence to a sanguinary and immoral doctrine,
and to gratify their hatred of a rival sacerdotalism, and their dislike to a
religion which wholly repudiates sacerdotalism and the vicarious principle.
The notion that we English are the
true Israel in that we are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, has
long found favour with many who have discerned a certain spiritual resemblance
between the Jews and ourselves. The notion rests on a basis which is far from
being fantastic. There is much in our national character and history to suggest
the thought that that
(p. 158)
exquisite soul, perfected by so much
suffering, rejected by the body of
If I seem to dwell at inordinate
length and with extreme insistence on the relations in which the religious and
intellectual sections of the community stand in regard to this question, I must
plead that it is they who have assumed what I
(p. 159)
hold to be the most pernicious initiative,
and that their very position gives them a power for evil which is possessed by
no others. It is to these that we have hitherto given with unhesitating
confidence the charge of our bodies, minds, and souls. And it is because they
have abused that confidence, and we are under their guidance going fast to utter
min, that it is necessary to point out with such plainness that no one can be in
doubt, the fact that we must abandon them, and seek for new teachers and
leaders. No doubt there are plenty to maintain that, putting the present
question aside, we are in a very good and even improving case, and to assert
that there are statistics which show a decided advance. But it has yet to be
shown that material prosperity is any index to spiritual vitality.
The tests ordinarily proposed,
such as a certain increase in the length of life, a certain diminution in the
number of convictions for crime, a certain enlargement in the stature of the
race, or increase in the number and splendour of our churches and schools, seem
to me wholly fallacious, inasmuch as these do not of themselves constitute the
elements which minister to the real progress of a nation, but may consist with
both moral and intellectual deterioration. This a truth which,
(p. 160)
known thousands of years ago, obtained
recognition in the days of David, of whom it is recorded that he, with his
people, incurred a punishment of tremendous severity for instituting a census of
their material strength, instead of trusting to their spiritual vitality.
It depends, for instance, upon the
use to which our schools and churches are put, whether they do us good or harm.
If the religion inculcated in our churches is to be the same doctrine of blood
that it always has been; if the death, and Dot the life, of Christ is to be held
up as the way of salvation, and if priests who are not prophets are still to be
the ministers, – the multiplication of churches will be but the extension of
that which constitutes the basis of all our evils. If our schools are to be
applied simply to the process of reversing the old methods, if they are to be
used for suppressing the reflective and synthetic faculties, as the
sacerdotalists have ever used them for suppressing the analytic and perceptive;
if, in a word, they are to represent the divorce of the head from the heart, as
the Church has represented the divorce of the heart from the head, our last case
will assuredly be worse than our first. Better to have men ignorant and
superstitious, than intelligent and conscienceless. The advocates of “secular
(p. 161)
education” among us are not without need of a
caution on this point. I would remind them that head and heart are as light and
heat, male and female, to each other in the system of humanity, and cannot be
divorced without certain ruin. The fear now is, that both are in danger of
rejection in favour of that part of us whose function m the sustenance of both;
and that in place of an education consisting in the development and regulation
of head and heart, these are discarded in favour of the belly. In the address of
one of the candidates at the recent school-board election, a single motive was
urged on behalf of education. It was that our artisans are being driven out of
the market through the superior intelligence of foreign artisans. Of the use of
education in its true sense – as the means of developing the whole consciousness
and character of the individual, and so making him more a man – not a word: Mr.
Alderman Bennett’s sole appeal was to the stomach. He knew his constituency, if
he did not quite know himself; for he was returned at the head of the poll for
the City of
The victory of the secular party was, nevertheless, a matter for lively
satisfaction. It represented, first, the determination of our people to Lave
education, and to have it homogeneous, cost
(p. 162)
what it might. And it represented, next, the
discomfiture of the sacerdotal and blood party. Let us only get the stain of blood
removed from our teaching, and w e shall not long remain content with the dry
husks of a merely intellectual training. The life then will have a chance of
obtaining recognition at last. For the present, however, it seems as if we must
undergo depression to a still lower level of vitality, perhaps to an abyss of
calamity, ere we accord a hearing to aught that does not appeal to our senses.
Should England show herself at this crisis able to see the right and to do it,
she will have reason to congratulate herself on every fresh accession to her
churches, chapels, and schools; for when once really alive throughout her whole
system, once fully conscious of the nature and place of her true centre, she
will thoroughly purge her Church of that unclean thing, a sanguinary
sacerdotalism. Not, however, by the remedies ordinarily suggested; not by
amputation or depletion; but simply by loosening the bonds in which thought and
utterance are now fettered, and allowing the light of freedom to enter her
ecclesiastical portals. All error is, as I have said, but limitation. And
limitation is catching. The limitations imposed upon thought and utterance in
the Church have extended to and vitiated our very science, Our
(p. 163)
freethinkers are not free, because they make
it a point of honour to reject the doctrines of the Church, whether false or
true. The admission of free thought into the Church will remove the antagonism
at present subsisting between the two sections, for neither sacerdotal nor
scientific orthodoxy can long outstay the dawning rays of the intuitions which
herald the rising of the soul, that sun at whose approach night vanishes, and
all fetters fall away from thought. Freed from the bondage in which she has
voluntarily enthralled herself, and admitting to her ministry all who, being
duly counted competent, are spiritually impelled to become teachers of their
fellows, the free Church of
(p. 164)
term that the Hebrew prophets reprobated the
tendencies of their people to exchange the God of Israel for those of other
nations. It may be well to bring it to the minds of those among us who are
proposing to exchange the God of England either for the blind, relentless
Will-God of political
The phrase is not a mere phrase; it is the forcible expression of an actual
fact. The seers of antiquity saw, as men can still see, if only they live purely
enough and think earnestly enough – two processes essential to perfection,
represented by “Water and the Spirit” – that the soul is no mere outcome or consensus of the bodily faculties, but an actual
entity, a bright and indestructible flame; and that the body is but as the
encasing glass through which the soul shines. And they saw that the functions of
prophet and priest – two classes which are essentially male and female to each
other – are, the one to tend and feed the flame of the soul, and the other to
tend and keep clean the glass of the body. They saw also that as there is an
individual soul of the individual, and a universal soul of the universe, so
between these is a
(p. 165)
national soul of the people or race, and that
every people is a people, individuated, united, and strong, in exact proportion
as they suffer that national soul to manifest itself in the m as a nation, and
cultivate or “worship” that soul, and strive to make themselves, its children, a
perfect manifestation of it in the flesh. The reason why the term “renegade” has
always been one of bitterest reproach, is that it has been, consciously or
unconsciously, held to signify one who renounced the national soul to follow
what was regarded as a strange god, namely, the soul of some other people, who,
not being the true ancestral soul of his race, could have no claim on his
allegiance. It was like changing one’s parents.
In idolatries of this kind priesthoods have always been ready consenters, if not
leaders. It is because a people’s perceptions of their own soul or deity have
become dim, and their affections alienated through the evil teaching of those
whose duty it is to keep alive in them the light of the ideal or true soul, that
they fall away from faith to sense, and go after strange gods, fancying that
they are better than their own gods, and can do more for them than their own;
“for have they not,” it is argued, “done more for the peoples who worship them,
and who are united and strong in their worship of them, than our gods
(p. 166)
are doing for us?” It has always been in such
a crisis of a people’s history that the prophet has found his sternest mission.
When the priest is faithless the people fall away; and when things are nearing
their worst the prophet appears. The false priest cares nothing what or how many
gods be worshipped, cares nothing whether they be of home or foreign growth, so
long as the people do worship, and allow him to have the control of their
worship. Every nation of antiquity has fallen and disappeared, simply because it
has quitted its own for “strange gods.” And every priesthood of antiquity has
ministered to such fall, either by leading or by following its people into
idolatry. Unpatriotism is thus idolatry. It signifies the worship of laws and
principles foreign to one’s own. The lesson of all history is, that the
quenching of the light of the soul, by refusing to heed its intuitions, is at
once the triumph of the false priest and the death of the true prophet; and that
when the true prophet is unheeded and his counsels rejected, the ancestral soul
of the people which has found in that prophet its perfected expression only to
have it rejected, is virtually “crucified,” and so departs, leaving its renegade
children to the destruction they have courted and ensured.
The perfect man of any race is no other than
(p. 167)
the perfect expression in the flesh of all
the essential characteristics of the soul of that race. Escaping the limitations
of the individual man, such an one represents the soul of his people. Escaping
the limitations of the individual people, he represents the soul of all peoples,
or humanity. Escaping the limitations of humanity, but still preserving the
essential characteristics of humanity, he represents the soul of the system of
which the earth is but an individual member. And, finally, After climbing many a
further step of the infinite ladder of existence, escaping the limitations of
all systems whatsoever, he represents – nay, finds that he is – the soul of the
universe, even “God” Himself, once “manifested in the flesh,” and now “perfected
by suffering,” “purified, sanctified, redeemed, justified, glorified,” “crowned,
with honour and glory,” and “seated for ever at the right h and of the Father,”
“one with God,” even God Himself.
Such is the spiritual history of every individual man and race who, instead of
“falling away” to strange gods – the souls or selfs of other peoples – instead
of cultivating its own lower nature and false self, refuses to quench its own
spirit and extinguish its own soul, and perseveres to the end, cultivating its
true self, and so “worshipping” its own soul.
(p. 168)
The soul, I have said, is crucified when its counsels are rejected. It is very important in our present case that we be certain which are the counsels of the soul, and which of the body. There is a test, hitherto an infallible one, by which this can be ascertained. The warning, “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you” is true now as ever where the soul is concerned. If in allying ourselves to Russia we obtain the applause of our chief priests and Pharisees, of our social magnates, of our literary, scientific, artistic, and other intellectual classes, and of the whole body of orthodox specialists, of whatever kind; if in allying ourselves to Russia we obtain the approbation of all the Governments of Europe, on the ground that we are doing the wise and sensible thing in abandoning our past policy of isolation, – the policy which consists in shutting ourselves up, as it were, with our own Jehovah, and imagining that we have a standard of right and wrong which transcends the standards of other peoples; and if, moreover, in doing all this, we gain the approval of our own false and superficial judgment, which is inciting us to become the executioners of what we fancy to be a Divine vengeance upon our erring brother, the Moslem, by offering him up as a bloody sacrifice to our own. Lower
(p. 169)
nature, at the instigation of a sanguinary
orthodoxy, working on the behoof of the powers of darkness, incarnated in the
great empire of the north, backed by our own sacerdotalists, “Woe, woe,” indeed,
it will be to us “when all men speak well of us.”
But how shall we speak of ourselves when, roused from our self-complacency by
disaster after disaster, loss after loss, one depth of ruin fathomed only to
find another abyss opening to receive us, we awake to find that the Power we
have enabled to overrun Turkey has absorbed the whole region through which lies
our road to the Orient; that the physical prestige which ministered to our
possession of India is no longer backed by the consciousness of the spiritual
affinity which constituted the true bond between us and the Hindoo; but that
every bond, material and spiritual, has been rent asunder, and a hopeless and
impassable barrier has been erected between us and the last remaining outlet for
our sympathetic expansion?
For, be it noted, the “Eastern
question” does not terminate with the dominion of the Sultan. He is Pope or
spiritual chief over a far vaster area. At this moment
(p. 170)
the Papacy and modern, thought, the conflict
between
Losing
(p. 171)
and “replenished the earth” with a hardy and
energetic stock, and one withal that has a spark of the great ancestral national
soul of
(p. 172)
orthodoxies, in which the lower nature of man
is ever formulating itself – England will multiply on the spiritual plane of the
world’s consciousness as she has never multiplied on the physical; her spiritual
seed shall rise up and call her blessed, and these shall be countless as the
sands of the seashore. To her, achieving such triumphs on the plane of the
spirit, all that she has done in the past on the plane of sense will seem but as
the toys of his childhood seem to the matured, perfected, and triumphant man.
Such is the prospect for our dear, but not old, not decrepit, England, if she
but fling to the winds, as idle and wicked words, the counsels of a selfish and
blood-stained orthodoxy, and suffer her great true heart to speak.
And what if she will not do this?
What if she listens to the “prophets who prophesy falsely, and the priests who
bear rule by their means?” Will the issue be that which she will love to have?
Surely not. Her colonies gone, the East closed against her as with a door of
steel, England will fall back into herself, like a sun that, used up and burnt
out, withdraws from its place in the system it once filled with glory to itself
and blessing to others, either leaving the planets to which it has given birth
to shiver waste away in the lifeless void of space, or
(p. 173)
drawing them back into its darkened self to
perish in its chill embrace;
(p. 174)
as I have said, will she also straightway
fall on her knees and cry, “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and in Thy
sight:” and rising, she will go, clothed and in her right mind, to the Moslem,
and extending to him both her hands, still wet with tears of her repentance,
will from the bottom of her heart exclaim, “Brother, forgive me, we were both in
the wrong.”
But where is the
(p. 175)
display; seeking its chief delight, – its men
in bloodshed, and its women in the foulnesses of a divorce-court; capable of
appreciating only a debased art, a blind science, a superficial policy, a
fetish-worshipping ritual; – yet withal amazed and distressed when its daughters
openly turn wantons and its sons sharpers; – plainly it is not to what in
England is called “Society” that the appeal is to be made.
Our Legislature – that model of
representative institutions – shall the appeal be to that? Representative
government is indeed an admirable de vice when the people represented are
themselves admirable. At present our Legislature is admirable, chiefly in that
it does represent us. It is a faithful mirror to show us ourselves as we are. If
w e do not like the i m age, that is not the mirror’s fault. We may pretend to
despise a Legislature that so faithfully represents the selfish body of England
that – when appealed to by the compassionate soul of England for protection for
its poor, dumb citizens, who, being dumb and unrepresented in Parliament, have
no voice in the making of the laws under which they live and suffer, and are
thus utterly helpless unless represented by human hearts – it enacts a statute
legalising the evil and protecting the tormentors; while, as if by
(p. 176)
way of apology and compensation for having
been forced to interfere at all in their practices, the Government offers to
give the chief society of inquisitors, out of the public treasury, a fivefold
subsidy to provide additional victims for the torture. We may pretend to despise
a Legislature that tramples under foot appeal after appeal from the toiling
masses of England for permission to use the only day in the week they can spare
from the necessities of the body, in expanding their minds and souls by the
sight of their own treasures of nature and art in their own public galleries,
and learning thereby to take larger and higher views of that wondrous Existence
of which the culture of the true self is the only true worship. But there is no
blood in such a worship as this would be; and so the orthodoxies say, No. We may
despise, I say, our Legislature for these and all its like doings; but inasmuch
as that Legislature is representative of ourselves, it is ourselves that we
really despise, and rightly so, in despising it. It is; we who first require
amendment. When this is accomplished, we shall have no cause to despise our
representatives. The mirror will still return a true image, and we shall see it
and be satisfied. But, as at present constituted, our Legislature represents
what we must hope will
(p. 177)
soon be our past and renounced self, and not
the self upon which depends the salvation of
Indeed, on looking around for some one whom we may trust to guide us, some one
at once capable and ingenuous, and seeing no one, the words used by our laureate
on a precisely similar occasion, now nearly a quarter of a century ago – namely,
on the eve of the war in the
Ah! God, for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
One still strong man in a blatant land,
Whatever they call him, what care I,
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat – one
Who can rule and dare not lie!
And what is the prospect abroad? There all are against the people who, however
imperfectly, with however many and grievous a slip, has so long been for the
world the people who above all other people have shown themselves possessed of a
conscience. Our envoy, going the round of the Courts of Europe, finds smiles and
encouragement for the policy which, by bringing
(p. 178)
conscience and
To that same foolish body the fact
of the emancipation of
Is it asked, – But is not the
Russian also “a man and a brother?” A brother, if you will, is
(p. 179)
the reply, but hardly a man. Anatomically
man, no doubt, but that suffices only for the external eye. It takes more than
the visible organism of a man to make a man.
(p. 180)
he is a product, and readily ascertainable,
as is all knowledge good and necessary for man, without the selfish infliction
of a particle of suffering upon aught that breathes and feels. But just as the
prophet who is to tell us of the true nature and uses of the soul, and the
priest who is rightly to minister thereto, have yet to appear; so has the true
scientist yet to appear who is to tell us of the true nature and treatment of
the body.
Failing to discover any special class or classes to whom to address the appeal
on behalf of the soul of
(p. 181)
thus that all controversy – even this of “
(p. 182)
essentially one with man, and in man “one
with God.” If Christianity still lives, it must develop; and there are not
wanting indications to show that it does live, though terribly debilitated
through the efforts of the orthodoxies to kill it outright, – efforts ever being
renewed on some fresh plane of the consciousness to smother it outright in
blood. There are signs, I say, that Christianity – the true Christianity of the
intuitions – is alive; and those signs point to the early promulgation of a new
dogma which is even now far advanced in its development. True, and self-evident
to the true, the new dogma will, like all its brethren, have its source in God,
and its manifestation through individuals. Its promulgation will be the utter
abrogation of the regime of blood and torture by which existence has so long
been made hideous. The place of its issue can only be
For it cannot possibly be to a
false and sanguinary sacerdotalism. That earth will condescend to owe the
promulgation of the new dogma of the redemption of the animals. It will be the
work of those true priests – priests and prophets both – who, keeping alive on
the altar of the national
(p. 183)
heart the sacred fire of the soul, will teach
us to see ourselves in all things, all things in ourselves, in and around all
things God, and in God all things.
The question of
(p. 184)
downfall with some eagerness, is also
watching it with trepidation, not knowing what may become of the civilisation of
Europe when the star of the one conscientious people in it has fallen from its
place in the firmament, Europe will trust England, knowing that it is for her
interest and honour, as well as her conscience, that she deal fairly with the
Turk, and that she has no interest in doing other than establishing him firmly
in his seat. Europe will trust
Let
(p. 185)
name of her outer, false, apparent, and
selfish self of the body, but in the name of her inner and true self, the soul
that burns within her, with solemn Firmness say, “We, Christian and Moslem,
Aryan and Semite, foremost representatives of our respective religions and
races, are, to all intents and purposes, in the sight of God, of man, and of
each other, wedded as man and wife to each other, in earthly and spiritual bonds
– bonds not made with hands, eternal, indissoluble. One in outward interests as
in inward conviction, we owe it to ourselves to become one in heart and spirit
also. We owe this to ourselves and to the world also, in that we are the best
representatives of the race of the prophets, the depositories of the only true
faith, the faith in one God as the Father of all, and the hater of blood. For
know, O Islam, that henceforth we also shall serve God bloodlessly, in body,
mind, and spirit, Laving resolved to overthrow our sanguinary orthodoxies, which
are even now discomfited and slain in our rejection of their counsels. Wherefore
you, pure worshippers of Islam, need not shrink from touching our hand. If we,
the witnesses to the only true faith, to the possessors of which it was promised
thousands of years ago that they should inherit the earth, and that in them
should all nations be blessed, – if we, the
(p. 186)
two witnesses on earth to the faith of the
intuitions, fail, then will the earth sink deeper and deeper in blood until it
be wholly lost. And so will your ancestral soul and ours, the souls of your
father Abraham and of our parent Christ, have lived and died in vain. Come,
then, let bygones be bygones, and we will lay our minds together to set your
house in order within and without, and so do all things in ‘the unity of the
spirit and the bond of peace,’ that the world, wondering, shall say, ‘See how
these Pantheists love one another!’ for the lesser names then will be merged in
the greater.”
(p. 187)
Happily the truth is out now, and
(p. 188)
Turkey have discovered that they can settle
their own affairs without assistance; that England, as is well known, has no
other interest or desire but to see Turkey prosperous; that they now thoroughly
understand each other; and have agreed to devote themselves to love and good
works for the rest of their natural lives. The envoy might also add a remark to
the effect that England herself, not many years ago, incurred exceeding
annoyance through the action of a certain foreign spiritual potentate who
insisted on extending to his fellow-religionists within her borders, an
interference which was but a feeble anticipation of that which the Czar now
proposes to extend to his fellow-religionists in the Turkish dominions; and that
while she cannot prevail upon herself to consent to an act of the same kind in
the territories of an ally, she will take good care that nothing be left undone
to benefit the populations in question.
And so, it will be exclaimed, you
counsel
(p. 189)
own head, But I hold that, being sure we are
in the right, we have no call to take consequences into consideration at all. It
is precisely the people who hesitate to do what they see to be right because
they fancy they can foresee consequences also, who in this world always come to
the direst grief. Ours is the duty, the consequences belong to another. It is
only through that want of faith in the harmonious ordering and perfect moral
government of the world, which in this age of all the orthodoxies has been
adopted as a substitute for the faith which has made all the greatness of
England, that we are found now to lay so much stress upon consequences. It all
comes of our not perceiving that the world is alive. But there are those among
us who do perceive, not merely that it must be, but that it is, alive, – alive
with an intelligent and moral life; who know it both by reason and by direct
vision. Let, then, the seeing lead the blind. I for one see that the world is
alive. And as regards this present matter I see that it is our bounden duty to
uphold
(p. 190)
about it, the better for all concerned, The
consequences of any dallying or half measures will fall upon our own heads.
Let this fact encourage us. The
present crisis has come upon
Such all effect would be produced
by a positive declaration on the part of
But supposing
(p. 191)
left to herself. She would be fighting at
home, fighting with soldiers who are perfect enthusiasts at the work; for it is
a fixed belief of the Moslem, that death in fight with non-believers in their
Prophet means instantaneous admission into heaven. Seeing then that even without
No consideration of consequences, however, should be suffered to affect
(p. 192)
incident which well illustrates the kind of
feeling with which a people that knows by direct intuition that it is in the
right, should go into war.
The prophet Elisha found himself surrounded by a large force which had been sent
to capture him. His servant, on seeing his master and himself encompassed by
horses and chariots and a great host, cried, “Alas, my master, how shall we do
now? And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that
be with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee open his eyes, that
he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw:
and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots round about Elisha.”
Let us take a fresh departure.
True Liberalism is ever true Conservatism. Even in the sphere of politics we
cannot escape from the eternal verity seen so long ago, that “God created man in
his own image, male and female.” In politics Liberalism is the male, and
Conservatism is the female element. Divorced and antagonistic to each other,
they are productive of evil only. United in the bonds of truest affection, they
are the agents of all political redemption. “Secular”
(p. 193)
It is not Liberal England only that must reform herself to fit her
for her part in the coming regeneration. Little good in the world can the man
accomplish if the woman be not his coadjutor. Our Conservatism also must reform
itself. Of these two perfected parents, will the new and true Church of England
be the product; divine child of divinest love, redeeming
Why is it that all the isms have failed to take man whither
he wants to go? It is because they are but isms, and have no pan before them. This, and this
alone, is the reason why Theism fails to enlist men’s hearts. They cannot care
for a God
(p. 194)
that is only a god. However great, he must be
man also. Identity is essential. But if he is to include the whole of his
creation, he must be something lower than a man. Something lower than a woman.
He must be –––. But no; time is not yet for us; though the Hindoos saw it
thousands of years ago. “Line upon line.” Not all truth at once. Only such as
can be borne. But this I may say – When a man – or woman – finds himself
animated by a soul – a soul that seems by its character to belong to one of the
lower animals – let him consider before yielding to his lower impulses, that
perchance it is such a soul which has become incarnate in him for the purpose of
working out its own redemption and so rising to a higher plane of existence; and
that if he fail to give its upward aspirations fair play, he will himself be
drawn down by it to the level of the animal. The true lesson of vivisection, and
of other moral monstrosities, is not a physical but a spiritual one. For it is
that, not only are men descending to the level of the carnivorous animals, but
that in taking possession of men in order that they themselves may rise, it may
be that the carnivorous animals are at the same time operating to drag men down
to their own level. I commend the prospect to the vivisecting physiologist.
Inaccessible to pity for
(p. 195)
others, he will be all the more considerate
for himself. The old rule, “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to
you again,” is still in full force. He insists that man is a carnivorous animal,
not merely by degradation of habit, but by natural constitution. He insists,
therefore, that it is necessary for the benefit of man to experiment upon
animals constituted as he holds man to be – namely, carnivorous animals. Hence
the risk the vivisector runs when he indulges his carnivorous propensities by
inflicting torture upon the rudimentary animal soul. For while the tendency of
the animal is upward into man, the tendency of the vivisecting, or otherwise
selfish pain-inflicting-in-any-shape, man is downwards; so that it is only a
question of time when the tormentor shall in his own person know what it is to
be “experimented upon for the benefit of humanity.”
The true Church of England will be no narrow sect striving with its brothers for
place and profit, but will consist of the whole body of England regenerated by
the “washing of water and of the spirit,” by pure living and true feeling – head
and heart, thought and emotion, male and female, working together “in the unity
of the spirit and the bond of peace.”
It is necessary thus to glance at the prospects
(p. 196)
which he before our
A being of this character, be it nation or individual, may be one to be on
speaking, and
(p. 197)
even friendly, terms with; but one cannot
possibly mate an intimate of him, much less a husband or a wife. He would be
dangerous even in his sleep; extending his big, ungainly limbs; and tossing his
uncouth and ponderous form all unconsciously to himself, he would be sure to
overlay and suffocate any smaller comrade, of however highly vitalised a
temperament, who might adventure to share his couch. Surely a better prospect
than this for our English Church is that which I have suggested; and if we only
succeed in getting well hold of the idea, and of all that it involves,
three-fourths of the existing inducements to combine with Russia against, or
even in favour of, Turkey, will disappear.
Do my readers know what means the striving of woman in this our age to obtain
what are contemptuously called her “rights”? And what means also the bitter
opposition of the men to the recognition of those rights? A good deal has been
said and written on the subject, but I fail to gather that it has been put quite
so clearly as it might be put; so I will endeavour to state it as it appears to
me. It is all related to our main subject of “England and Islam” and the
“Counsel of Caiaphas;” for a people’s difficulties grow out of a people’s own
condition, just as a definite illness is, in the case of an individual, due
(p. 198)
to a previously disordered state of his
constitution. Scientists tell us of “disease-germs” as sacerdotalists tell us of
“evil spirits” who enact in the spiritual world a part corresponding to that
ascribed to disease-germs in the material world. In this, as in many other
things, scientists are discovering on the physical plane of the consciousness
that which was long ago recognised as existing on its spiritual plane. Of the
existence of vitalised “force-points,” the introduction of which into the
constitution, and whose development there may be the cause of mischief, physical
or spiritual, according to the plane for which they have affinity, there can be
no doubt. But may it not be that they are in themselves neutral? and that only
when, by man’s neglect of a proper standard of purity, his issues have already
become degenerated, they can work him harm? The perfectly sound constitution has
in it a divine alchemy, by virtue of which it turns everything that it comes
into contact with into the pure gold of good man and woman. Had
That we are beginning to know something on this matter is due to the industry
and sagacity of Professor Tyndall. To this
(p. 199)
ingenious scientist are due also the thanks
of the intuitionalist for the recognition he has accorded to the imagination as
an instrument of scientific research. It is true he has not done this faculty of
the mind anything like proper justice. But that is inevitable with one in
Professor Tyndall’s position in the ranks of orthodoxy. It requires more vivid
experiences on planes of the consciousness other than the merely physical, to
enable a man to discern the true uses of the imagination. Professor Tyndall is,
I believe, still a young man, being only lately married. Maybe he will have a
good deal more to tell us some day, of the new meanings he will find in
existence. Vivisection will not reveal them to him.
Marriage is an institution admirably adapted for ministering to the due
subordination of the outer, false, and non-luminous self of the body, to the
inner, true, and luminous soul, which, burning ever brightly in the heart, makes
for man the true self and home, and wins from him unconsciously the designation
of “the better half.”
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