(as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones),
turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.
Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would
be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth.
The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people
who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness,
their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care
for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only
by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists,
as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done
or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make
a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our
own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning;
because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games
of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land.
Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an
unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without
the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment
the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible
religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.
Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows
any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work.
That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately
to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun
or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship
cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not
the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order
to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm