All Things Considered eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 212 pages of information about All Things Considered.
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All Things Considered eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 212 pages of information about All Things Considered.
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.

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All Things Considered from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.