The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty but of revolution,There are two great armies of the human intellect who will fight till the end on this vital point,whether Easter is to be congratulated on fitting in with the Spring--or the Spring on fitting in with Easter.
The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story;and even a story must be about a person.There are indeed very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like mathematics,logic,or chess.But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of the body.That is,they are mere pleasures,though they may be gigantic pleasures;they can never by a mere increase of themselves amount to happiness.A man just about to be hanged may enjoy his breakfast;especially if it be his favourite breakfast;and in the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy,especially if it is his favourite heresy.But whether he can enjoy either of them does not depend on either of them;it depends upon his spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event.And that event is really interesting to the soul;because it is the end of a story and (as some hold)the end of a person.
Now it is this simple truth which,like many others,is too simple for our scientists to see.This is where they go wrong,not only about true religion,but about false religions too;so that their account of mythology is more mythical than the myth itself.I do not confine myself to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation,like Adonis or Persephone.I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation,they have got the whole notion of him wrong.Nobody,to begin with,is sufficiently interested in decaying vegetables,as such,to make any particular mystery or disguise about them;and certainly not enough to disguise them under the image of a very handsome young man,which is a vastly more interesting thing.If Adonis was connected with the fall of leaves in autumn and the return of flowers in spring,the process of thought was quite different.It is a process of thought which springs up spontaneously in all children and young artists;it springs up spontaneously in all healthy societies.It is very difficult to explain in a diseased society.
The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep.Acloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination;a dream that darkens as much,whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a day-dream of idolatry.And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning,save in the mad tongues of the midnight;so the human mind starts from its trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips;a complete phrase which is a complete folly.Unfortunately it is not like the dream sentence,generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting in of breakfast.This senseless aphorism,invented when man's mind was asleep,still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to rational and daylight things.All our controversies are confused by certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue,but were always unmeaning;which are not merely inapplicable,but were always intrinsically useless.We recognise them wherever a man talks of "the survival of the fittest,"meaning only the survival of the survivors;or wherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country,"as if the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat;or where a man talks about "going on towards Progress,"which only means going on towards going on;or when a man talks about "government by the wise few,"as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons."The wise few"must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who think themselves wise.
