mprehensive study of them: he only expressed
his own grievance with an overwhelming sense that it is a grievance so
deep that all the considerations on the other side are as dust in the
balance. Obviously there are such considerations, and very weighty ones
too. When Talleyrand said that a married man with a family is capable
of anything, he meant anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with
equal half truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that
marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and women
will, for love of their mates and children, practise virtues that
unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true that too much of
this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all;
but then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely
self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as
cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more
resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule: both Brand
and Peer Gynt come to a bad end; and though Brand does not do as much
mischief as Peer, the mischief he does do is of extraordinary intensity.

CELIBACY NO REMEDY.

We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage and
family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual to be free
from them because they hamper his own work intolerably. When he said
that if we are to follow him in the sense of taking up his work we must
give up our family ties, he was simply stating a fact; and to this day
the Roman Catholic priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all
the eastern denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the
physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic of all
kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest sacrifice in marriage
is the sacrifice of the adventurous attitude towards life: the being
settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settlement; but to
fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of
any institution that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and
adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the moralizings
of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its slavery.
The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried Beethoven, the unmarried Joan of
Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence Nightingale seem as they should be; and
the saying that there is always something ridiculous about a married
philosopher bec