his drawing upon some power. And this can only
be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed;
when all the current of his bodily being is reversed
and turned to pain. If a man is seen to be roaring
with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive,
it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere
in the recesses of his mind he had thought of a rather
good joke. Similarly, if men smiled and sang
(as they did) while they were being boiled or torn
in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something
more than mere mental honesty: they felt the
presence of some new and unintelligible kind of pleasure,
which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might
be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell;
but it was something quite positive and extraordinary;
as positive as brandy and as extraordinary as conjuring.
The Pagan said to himself: “If Christianity
makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten by
a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are
still attached to me and walking down the street?”
The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms
do not prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was
ever such a fool as to suppose that they did.
What they did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest,
was that something had entered human psychology which
was stronger than strong pain. If a young girl,
scourged and bleeding to death, saw nothing but a
crown descending on her from God, the first mental
step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that
she was certainly feeding on something. But this
particular point of psychology does not arise at all
in the modern cases of mere public discomfort or inconvenience.
The causes of Miss Pankhurst’s cheerfulness require
no mystical explanations. If she were being burned
alive as a witch, if she then looked up in unmixed
rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out of heaven,
then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive,
was frightfully impressive. It would not prove
logically that she ought to have the vote, or that
anybody ought to have the vote. But it would
prove this: that there was, for some reason, a
sacramental reality in the vote, that the soul could
take the vote and feed on it; that it was in itself
a positive and overpowering pleasure, capable of being
pitted against positive and overpowering pain.
I should advise modern agitators, therefore, to give
up this particular method: the method of making
very big efforts to get a very small punishment.
It does not really go down at all; the punishment is
too small, and the efforts are too obvious. It
has not any of the effectiveness of the old savage
martyrdom, because it does not leave the victim absolutely
alone with his cause, so that his cause alone can
support him. At the same time it has about it
that element of the pantomimic and the absurd, which
was the cruellest part of the slaying and the mocking
of the real prophets. St. Peter was crucified
upside down as a huge inhuman joke; but his human
seriousness survived the inhuman joke, because, in
whatever posture, he had died for his faith.
The modern martyr of the Pankhurst type courts the
absurdity without making the suffering strong enough
to eclipse the absurdity. She is like a St. Peter
who should deliberately stand on his head for ten seconds
and then expect to be canonised for it.