the world--a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity
by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in
accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was
surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at
noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were
public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire
and conception of the victims.

The mere grammatical meaning of the word 'martyr' breaks into pieces at
a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian
martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In
our day the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all
this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His
Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could
not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a
martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational,
though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by
a lion in one's own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.

It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has
inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars
have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked
and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange
world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame,
if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves
and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at
sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds
flew, like bats, by night.