Whither?
The fever of modern thought which burns in our veins, and from which we refuse to escape by reactionary backdoors—Christianity and the like—is not without its distinction: it is an "honourable sickness," to use the phrase of Nietzsche. I speak of those who sincerely strive to seek an issue from this fever; to pass through it into a new health. Of the others to whom fever is the condition of existence, who make a profession of their maladies, the valetudinarians of the spirit, the dabblers in quack soul-remedies for their own sake, it is impossible to speak without disdain. Our duty is to exterminate them, by ridicule or any other means found effectual. But we are ourselves already too grievously harassed; we are caught in the whirlwind of modern thought, which contains as much dust as wind. We see outside our field of conflict a region of Christian calm, but never, never, never can we return there, for our instincts as well as our intellect are averse to it. The problem must have a different solution. And what, indeed, is the problem? To some of us it is still that of emancipation—that which confronted Goethe, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the other great spirits of last century. It is an error to think that these men have yet been refuted or even understood; they have simply been buried beneath the corpses of later writers. And it is the worst intellectual weakness, and, therefore, crime, of our age that ideas are no longer disproved, but simply superseded by newer ideas. The latest is the true, and Time refutes everything! That is our modern superstition. We have still, then, to go back—or, rather, forward—to Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche. Our problem is still that of clearing a domain of freedom around us, of enlarging our field of choice, and so making destiny itself more spacious; and, then, having delivered ourselves from prejudice and superstition—and how many other things!—of setting an aim before us for the unflinching pursuit of which we make ourselves responsible.
Greater freedom, and therefore greater responsibility, above all greater aims, an enlargement of life, not a whittling of it down to Christian standards—that is our problem still!
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The "Restoration" of Christianity
Will Christianity ever be established again? It is doubtful. At the most, it may be "restored"—in the manner of the architectural "restorations," against which Ruskin declaimed. The difficulty of re-establishing it must needs be greater than that of establishing it. For it has now been battered by science (people no longer believe in miracles) and by history (people have read what the Church has done—or has not done). Christianity has become a Church, and the Church, an object of criticism. As the body which housed the spirit of Christianity, men have studied it with secular eyes, and have found little to reverence, much to censure; and in the disrepute into which the body has fallen, the spirit, also, has shared. And now the atmosphere cannot be created in which Christianity may grow young again and recapture its faith. The necessary credulity, or, at any rate, the proper kind of credulity, is no longer ours. For Christianity grew, like the mushrooms, in the night. Had there been newspapers in Judea, there had been no Christianity. And this age of ours, in which the clank of the printing press drowns all other sounds, is fatal to any noble mystery, to any noble birth or rebirth. That night, at all events, we can never pass through again, and, therefore, Christianity will probably never renew itself.
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A Drug for Diseased Souls
The utmost that can be expected is a "restoration," and in that direction we have gone already a long way. For Christianity is not now, as it was at the beginning, a spring of inspiration, a thing spiritual, spontaneous, Dionysian. It is mainly a remedy, or, more often, a drug for diseased souls; and, therefore, to be husbanded strictly by the modern medicine men, to be dispensed carefully, and, yes, to be advertised as well! Its birth was out of an exuberance of spiritual life; its "restoration" will be out of a hopeless debility and fatigue. And, therefore——
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