What is wrong with this generation?  Public opinion is “a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.”  Democracy means “a victory of sentiment over reason”; it is the triumph of the unfit, the ascendancy of the second-rate, the conquest of quality by quantity, the smothering of the hard and true under the feather-bed of the soft and the false.

Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . .  Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist.  He thinks that he can break or ignore nature’s laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his theoretical objection to capital punishment a lust to murder all who disagree with him.

Beware of sentiment!  Beware of it in politics, beware of it in religion.  See things as they are.  Accept human nature for what it is.  Consult history.  Judge by reason and experience.  Act with courage.

As he faces politics, so he faces religion.

He desires to rescue Christianity from all the sentimental vulgarities which have disfigured it in recent years—­alike from the aesthetic extravagances of the ritualist and the organising fussiness of the evangelical; to rescue it from these obscuring unessentials, and to set it clearly before the eyes of mankind in the pure region of thought—­a divine philosophy which teaches the only true science of life, a discipline which fits the Soul for its journey, “by an inner ascent,” to the presence of God.  Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing.

Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind.  It cannot be seen at a glance, understood in a moment, adopted by a gesture.  It is a deep and profound philosophy of life.  It proposes a transvaluation of values.  It insists that the spiritual life is the only true life.  It sets the invisible above the visible, and the eternal above the temporal.  It tears up by the roots the lust of accumulation.  It brings man face to face with a choice that is his destiny.  He must think, he must decide.  He cannot serve both God and Mammon.  Either his life must be given for the imperishable values of spiritual existence or for the meats that perish and the flesh that will see corruption.  Let a man choose.  Christianity contradicts all his natural ideas; but let him think, let him listen to the voice of God, and let him decide as a rational being.  Let him not presume to set up his trivial notions, or to think that he can silence Truth by bawling falsehood at the top of his voice.  Let him be humble.  Let him listen to the teacher.  Let him give all his attention to this great matter, for it concerns his soul.

Here again is the aristocratic principle.  The average man, until he has disciplined his reason to understand this great matter, must hold his peace; certainly he must not presume to lay down the law.