50 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



knowledge, the choice is again presented to us : Shall 

 we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness ? Shall 

 our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as 

 the creation of our own conscience ? 



The answer to this question is very momentous, and 

 affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of 

 Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of 

 Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to 

 maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe : it is 

 itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our 

 best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, 

 let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse 

 that false " recognition of facts ' which fails to recog- 

 nise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the 

 world we know, there are many things that would be 

 better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and 

 must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let 

 us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the 

 ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to 

 attain, though none of these things meet with the ap- 

 proval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as 

 it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this 

 lies Man's true freedom : in determination to worship 

 only the God created by our own love of the good, to 

 respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our 

 best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit 

 perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces ; but in 

 thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow- 

 men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies 

 impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the 

 tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of 

 faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of 

 the good ; and let us descend, in action, into the world 

 of *act, with that vision always before us. 



