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Show j The Preceptor Hu By John Galsworthy. TT B had a philosophy as yot untouched. His B 1 stars wore the old stars, his faith the old B faith; nor would ho recognize that there was any B pther, for, not to recognize any point of view ox- B copt his own was no doubt the very essence of hlB H faith. Wisdom! There wast surely none save the H Hinging of the door to, standing with your hack B against that door, and telling people what was be- H hind it. For though he could not Know what was B behind, lie thought It low to say so. An "atheist," B as he termed certain- persons, was to him beneath B contempt, an "agnostic," as ho termed certain oth- Wm ors, a poor and foolish creature. As for a ration- B alist, positlviBt, pragmatist, or any other "1st" Hj well, that was just what they were. He made no gK secret of the fact that he simply could not under- B stand people like that. It was true "What can KV they do save deny?" ho would say: "What do B they contribute to the morals and the elevation HI of the world? What have they got, to make up Bj for what is behind that door? Where are their B symbols? How shall they move and lead the B people? No," he said, "a little child shall lead B the people, and I am the little child! For I can B spin them a tale, such as children love, of what Is B behind that door." Such was the temper of his B, mind, that he never flinched from believing true Vfl what he thought would benefit himself and others B For example, he held a crown of ultimate advan- B tage to benecessary to pure and stable living. If B one could not say: "Listen, children! there it is, B behind the door! Look at it, shining, golden B yours! Not now but when you die, if you are good. fli Be good, therefore! For if you are not good no Bj crown!" If one could not say that what could B one sayT What inducement hold out? And he B would describe the crown! There was nothing he B detested more than commercialism. And to any- B one who ventured to suggest that there was some- B thing rather commercial about the idea of that Bj crowd, he would retort with asperity. A mere B' creed that good must be done, so to speak, just Bfl out of a present love of dignity and beauty as a man, seeing something he admired, might work 10 reproduce it, knowing that he would never achieve it perfectly, but going on until he dropped, out of sheer love of going on ho thought vague, futile, devoid of glamour and contrary to human nature, for he always judged people by himself, and felt that no one could like to go on unless they knew that they would get something If they did. To promise victory, therefore, was most important. im-portant. Forlorn hopes, setting your teeth, back to the wall, and all that, was bleak and wintry doctrine, without inspiration in it, because it led to nothing. And he abominated those others, who, not presuming to believe in anything, went on, because as they said to give up would be to lose their honor. This seemed to him most unpoetlc, as well as the very negation or faith; and faith was, as has been said, the main spring of his philosophy. Once, Indeed, in the unguarded moment of a heated argument, he had confessed that some day men might not require to use the symbols of re ligion which they used now. It was at once pointed point-ed out to him that if ho thought that, he could not believe these symbols to be true for all time; and if they were not true for all time, why did he say they wore? He was dreadfully upset. Deferring answer, however, for the moment, he was soon able to retort that the symbols were true or hysterically. If a man and this was the point did not stand by these symbols, by which could hn stand? Tell him that! Symbols were necessary. But what symbols were there in a mere Good Will; a mere vague following of one's own dignity and honor, out of a formless love of Life? How put up a religion of such amporhous and unrewarded unre-warded chivalry and devotion, how put up a blind love of Mystery, in place of a religion of definite crowns and punishments, how substitute a love of mere abstract Goodness, or Beauty, for love oE what could be called by Christian names? Human Hu-man nature being what Is was it would not do, it absolutely -would not do. Though he was fond of the words Mystery, Mystical, he had emphatically em-phatically no use for them when they were vaguely vague-ly used by people to express their perpetual (and quite unmoral) reverence for the feeling that they would never find out the secret of their own existence, ex-istence, never even understand the nature of the Universe or God. Mystery of all that kind seemed seem-ed to him very pagan, almost Nature-worship, having no llnality. And if confronted by someone some-one who said that a Mystery, if it could be understood under-stood would naturally not bo a Mystery, he would raise his eyebrows. It was that kind of loose, Jr specious, sentimental talk that did so much harm, and drew people away from right understanding of that Great Mystery which, if it was not understood under-stood and properly explained, was, for all practical prac-tical purposes, not a Great Mystery at all. No, it had all been gone into long ago and he stood b the explanations and Intended that everyone else should, for in that way alone men are saved; and though he well knew (for he was no Jesuit) that the end "d not justify the means, yet In a matter of su l all-Importance one stopped to consider neither means nor ends one just saved people. And as for truth the question of that did not arise, if one believed. What one believed, j what one was told to believe, was the truth; and it was no good telling him that the whole range of a man's feeling and reasoning powers must be exercise to ascertain Truth, and that, when ascertained, it would only be relative Truth, and the best available to that particular man. Nothing short of the absolute truth would he put up with, and that guaranteed fixed and immovable, or it was no good for his purpose. To anyone who threw out doubts here and doubts there, and even worse than doubts he had long formed the habit of saying simply, with a smll that he tried hard to make indulgent: "Of course, if you believe that!" But he very seldom had to argue on these matters, mat-ters, because people, looking at his face with Its upright bone formation, rather bushy eyebrows, and eyes with a good deal of light in them, felt that It would be simpler not. He seemed to them to know his own mind almost too well. Joined to this potent faculty of Implanting in men a child like trustfulness in what he told them was behind the door, he had a still more potent faculty of knowing exactly what was good for them in eeryday life. The secret of this power was sim- pie. Ho did not recognize the existence o what moderns and so called "artists" dubbed "temperament." "tempera-ment." All talk of that sort was bosh, and gen" orally immoral bosh; for all moral purposes people really had but ont temperament, and that was, of course, just like his own. And no one knew better bet-ter than he what was good for It. He was perfectly per-fectly willing to recognize the principle of individual in-dividual treatment for individual cases; but it did not do, in practice, he was convinced, to vary. This instinctive wisdom made him invaluable in all those departments of life where discipline and the disepensation of an even justice were important. To adapt men to the Moral Law was lie thought perhaps the iirst duty of a preceptor, pre-ceptor, especially in days when there was perceptible percept-ible a distinct but regrettable tendency to try and adapt the Moral Law "to the needs as they were glibly called of men. There was, perhaps, in him something of the pedagogue, and when he met a person who disagreed with him, his eye would shift a bit to the right and a bit to the left, then become firmly fixed upon that person from under brows rather drawn down; and his hand, large and strong, would move lingers, as 1 fmore and more tightly grapsing a cane, birch, or other wholesome instrument He loved his fellow-creatures so that he could not bear to see them going to destruction for want of a timely flogging to salvation. Ho was one of those who seldom felt the need for personal experience of a phase or life, or line of conduct, before giving judgment on it; indeed, he gravely distrusted personal experience. He had opposed, for instance, all relief for the unhappy un-happy married long before he left the single state; and when he did leave it, would not admit for a moment that his own happiness was at all responsible re-sponsible for the petrifaction of his view that no relief was necessary. Hard cases made bad law! But he did not require to base his opinion upon that. He said simply that he had been told there was to be no relief it was enough. The saying: "To understand all is to forgive all!" left him cold. It was, as he knew, quite impossible to identfy himself with such conditions ap produced poverty, disease, and crime, even if he wished to do so (which he sometimes doutbed . He knew better, therefore, than to waste his time attempting the impossible; and he pinned his faith to an instinctive knowledge of how to deal with all such social ills. A contended spirit for poverty, for disease isolation, and for crime such ppnishment as would at once deter others, reform the criminal, and convince everyone that Law must be avenged and the Social Conscience appeared. On this point of revenge he was emphatic. em-phatic. No vulgar personal feeling of vindictlve-ness, vindictlve-ness, of course, but a astiong State feeling of "an eye for an eye.' It was the only taint of Socialism that he permitted himself. Loose thinkers think-ers he knew dared to say that a desire for retribution retribu-tion or revenge was a purely human or individual feeling like hate, love, and jealously, and that to talk of satisfying such a feeling in the collected bosom of the State was either to talk nonsense How could a State have a bosom? or to cause the bosoms of the human individual who administered admin-istered the justice of the State to feel that each of them was itself that Stately bosom, and entitled en-titled to be revengeful. "Oh! no!" he would answer to such loose-thinking persons: "Judges, of course, give expression, not to what they feel themselves, but to what they imagine the State feels." He himself, for example, was perfectly able to imagine which ciimes were those that inspired in-spired in the bosom of the State a particular abhorrence, ab-horrence, a particular desire to be avenged now it was blackmail, now assaults upon children, or living on the earnings of immoral women; he was ceitain that the State regarded all these with (Continued on Page 11) THE PRECEPTOR H (Continued from Page 7) H peculiar detestation, for ho had, and quite rightly, H a particular detestation of them himself; and if iH he were a judge, he would never for a momont H restitate to visit on the perpetrators of such vile crimes the utmost vengeance of tho law. He was 1 no loose thinker. In these times bedridden with H loose thinking and sickly sentiment, he often felt H terribly the value of his own philosophy, and wa3 H afraid that it was in danger. But not many other H people held that view, discerning his finger still H very largo in every pie so much so that there H often seemed less pie than finger. H Tho London Nation. H |