ly handled, but stripped and stoned to
pieces, and burned, and there were no crowds to greet them with bravoes
and caresses, but furious mobs clamouring for their blood. We have
changed all that indeed, thank God: but they were heroes and martyrs
indeed, and it sounds to me somewhat like a desecration of the word to
apply it to men and even women who are good, probably brave in a way,
but who win their crown of glory very cheaply indeed. If we are to
have heroes, let us make sure that they possess some heroic stuff.

There is a vast amount of hero-worship to-day which reminds us too much
of that shout for Barabbas. We are glorifying the wrong people; at
least, most of us are. It is one of the deplorable weaknesses of the
times, or if you like it better, it is one of the fashions or crazes to
which human nature at times gives itself up. The heroes of the crowd,
of the great mass of people, are not the good men, not the men of light
and leading, not the men who are morally great or even intellectually
great, not the men who are the strength and salt of a nation, but the
men who minister to its pleasures, and lead the way in sports. No one
can have any doubt of that. No one can have any doubt about the sort
of persons whom the vast majority of young people, and some older
people too, delight to honour. With some it is the star of the music
hall or opera. With a great many more it is the winner of a race, or
the champion player in a successful football team, or the most
effective bowler, or the highest scorer in cricket. The crowd goes mad
about these heroes. There is no throne high enough to place them on.
Money and favours are lavished at their feet, and all the newspapers
are full of their glorious triumphs.

Mark I am not speaking against athletic sports. I like to see a well
and honestly played game, and I would join in the clapping when a man
makes a clever stroke. What I object to is the crazy and almost
delirious worship which is given to these champions of the sporting
world. It is the excess of the thing that proves a diseased state of
mind. There is more fuss made over some youth who scores a few
hundreds on the cricket-field, than there would be over a man who had
saved six hundred lives. In hundreds of journals his portrait appears,
and his doings are chronicled as if he had wrought some deliverance for
the nation. Poor lad, it is not his fault that he has sprung up
suddenly into fame, it is t