November 29.—The vast and complex machines to which our civilisation devotes its best energy are no doubt worthy of all admiration. Yet when one seeks to look broadly at human activity they only seem to be part of the scaffolding and material. They are not the Life itself.
To whatever sphere of human activity one turns one's attention to-day, one is constantly met by the same depressing spectacle of pale, lean, nervous, dyspeptic human creatures, restlessly engaged in building up marvellously complex machines and elaborate social organisations, all of which, they tell us, will make for the improvement of Life. But what do they suppose "Life" to be?
A giant's task demands a giant. When one watches this puny modern civilised Man engaged on tasks which do so much credit to his imagination and invention, one is reminded of the little boy who was employed to fill a large modern vat. He nearly completed the task. One day he disappeared. They found him at last with only his feet visible above the rim of the vat.
December 1.—I so frequently notice among Moral Reformers—for the most part highly well-intentioned people—a frantic and unbridled desire to eliminate from our social world any form of "Temptation." (One wonders how far this attitude may have been fostered by that petition of the Lord's Prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," which, on the face of it, seems to support Nietzsche's extravagant reaction against Christianity. Yet surely the Church has misunderstood that petition. Jesus himself faced the Tempter, and it is evident that he could not have so lacked insight into the soul's secrets as to countenance the impossible notion of eliminating Temptation from the world. It was the power to meet the Tempter and yet not be led into Temptation—if this petition may be regarded as authentic—that he desired his followers to possess; and therein he was on the same side as Nietzsche.) No scheme is too extravagantly impossible to invoke in this cause. No absurdity but we are asked to contemplate it with a seriously long face if it is sanctified by the aim of eliminating some temptation from the earth. Of any recognition of Temptation as the Divine method of burning Up the moral chaff of the world, not a sign!
The fact is that we cannot have too much Temptation in the world. Without contact with Temptation Virtue is worthless, and even a meaningless term. Temptation is an essential form of that Conflict which is of the essence of Life. Without the fire of perpetual Temptation no human spirit can ever be tempered and fortified. The zeal of the Moral Reformers who would sweep away all Temptation and place every young creature from the outset in a Temptation-free vacuum, even if it could be achieved (and the achievement would not only annihilate the whole environment but eviscerate the human heart of its vital passions) would merely result in the creation of a race of useless weaklings. For Temptation is even more than a stimulus to conflict. It is itself, in so far as it is related to Passion, the ferment of Life. To face and reject Temptation may be to fortify life. To face and accept Temptation may be to enrich life. He who can do neither is not fit to live.
He can indeed be sent to the Home for Defectives. That way lies perhaps the solution of our Social Problem. The pessimist may cry out at the size of the Homes that his fears portend. Yet, even at the worst, who will deny that it is better, beyond comparison better, that even only a minority of Mankind should be free—free to develop in the sun and free to climb to the sky and free to be damned—than that the whole world should be made one vast Home for Moral Imbeciles?
December 4.—There is nothing amid the restlessness of the world that one lingers over with such tender delight as Flowers and Gods. What can be more beautiful than Flowers and Gods?
Flowers are of all things most completely and profusely the obvious efflorescence of loveliness in the whole physical world. Gods are of all things the most marvellous efflorescence of the human psychic world. These two Lovelinesses, the Loveliness of Sex and the Loveliness of Creation, bring the whole universe to two polar points, which yet are in the closest degree resemblant and allied. In China, the land of flowers, flowers are nowhere, it is said, so devoutly cultivated as in the monasteries of Buddha. For flowers are constant symbols of the Gods and instruments of worship, and when the Gods take fitting shape it is a shape that recalls to us a flower. Of all Gods made visible none is so divine as Buddha (one's thoughts constantly return to the most delectable of museums, the Musée Guimet), and the Buddha of finest imagery is like nothing so much as a vast and serene flower, a great lotus that rises erect on the bosom of Humanity's troubled lake.
And perhaps it is because men and women are in function flowers and in image gods that they are so fascinating, even enwrapped in the rags, physical and metaphysical, which sometimes serve but to express more genuinely the Flower-God beneath.
December 11.—Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? So, we are told, an ancient holy man of the early Christian world was wont to question everything that was brought before him. It is a question that we cannot too often ask to-day. I assume that we understand "Eternity" in its essential Christian sense (on which F. D. Maurice used to insist) as referring not to the Future, but to the Everlasting Present, not to Time but to the Things that Matter.