nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.
As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for
humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin,
weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with
even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.
In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough.
The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.
The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.
There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect
the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped
arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ
into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are
equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.
They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they
have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top
throughout.



IV THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND


When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it
is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young,
one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;
but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down
to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has
and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and
philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me
when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered