and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.  I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.  Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought.  We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.  Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant.  Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior.  She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other.  Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.  It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost.  And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.  The same modern difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan.  Renan also divided his hero’s pity from his hero’s pugnacity.  Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.  As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity!  Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.  Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.  In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough.  The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.  The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.  There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments.  There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about.  They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.  They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.

IV THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this:  “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.”  Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy.  But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies.  What has really happened is exactly the opposite