We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.
The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints;but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites.
And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.
There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy.
It is always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerable triumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug, that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.
But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover.
The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.
There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire.
And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled.
For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane man how much he merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously.
It is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth.
But if you ask him what he can conquer--he can conquer the stars.
Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product.
A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
The mediaeval Europe which asserted humility gained Romance;the civilization which gained Romance has gained the habitable globe.
How different the Pagan and Stoical feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makes the great Stoic say--"'Tis not in mortals to command success;But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European adventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success.
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.
And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious.
Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice.
Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride.
It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity.
Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold;pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world;it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.
The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose.
When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph.
If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle;their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident.
Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there was a good ground for attacking them;but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious.
There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness;one might almost say because of his dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science.
Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility.
They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness.
