is tenable, but it is not specially favourable to activity or
progress. Our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on
the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a
thread or clinging to a precipice. To say that all will be well anyhow
is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a
trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasise possible perdition; and Europe
always has emphasised it. Here its highest religion is at one with all
its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence
is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a
Christian existence is a _story_, which may end up in any way. In a
thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by
cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he
_might_ be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable
hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he
would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In
Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it
is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast
and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about
ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is
concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? that is
the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy
enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is
really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the
instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in
theology dealt much with hell. It is full of _danger_ like a boy's book:
it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity
between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you
say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the
dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic
churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a
magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our
next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and
leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting
moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong
an element of wil