for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants,
sheep, sheep-stealers, etc. What then, you ask, would I do with these
unholy ones? To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, or
leave them to the slow throes of their agonies? Ah, do not expect me to
answer that question--I do not know what to answer. The whole spirit of
the present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless,
humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along by
it, coerced into sympathy with it. "Beautiful" I say: for if anywhere
in the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group of
hospital _savants_ bending with endless scrupulousness over a little
pauper child, concentering upon its frailty the whole human skill and
wisdom of ages, so have not I. Here have you the full realisation of a
parable diviner than that of the man who went down from Jerusalem to
Jericho. Beautiful then; with at least surface beauty, like the serpent
_lachesis mutus_; but, like many beautiful things, deadly too,
_in_human. And, on the whole, an answer will have to be found. As for
me, it is a doubt which has often agitated me, whether the central
dogma of Judaism and Christianity alike can, after all, be really one
of the inner verities of this our earthly being--the dogma, that by the
shedding of the innocent blood, and by that alone, shall the race of
man find cleansing and salvation. Will no agony of reluctance overcome
the necessity that one man die, "so that the whole people perish not"?
Can it be true that by nothing less than the "three days of pestilence"
shall the land be purged of its stain, and is this old divine
alternative about to confront us in new, modern form? Does the
inscrutable Artemis indeed demand offerings of human blood to suage her
anger? Most sad that man should ever need, should ever have needed, to
foul his hand in the [Greek: musaron aima] of his own veins! But what
is, is. And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of the
future shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of its