y would see to it that they lived in the
manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking
it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was
not even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their
constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and
proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of
subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting
and antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for
example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground
that the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would
inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give
its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and
rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been
developing in this book will see the value of these comments and
recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one
more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and
balanced living. They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as
an ideal of organization. They are never to be put, as people say, upon
a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual
problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent
but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide
for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he
needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter
and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is
no reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should,
discuss one's personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate
one's way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of
like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support.
That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous
section. With adolescent people in particular such association is in
many cases an almost instinctive necessity. There is no reason moreover
why everyone who is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and
contrive a grouping with them. All mutual lovers for example are Orders
of a limited membership, many married couples and endless cliques
and sets are that. Such