nity should also lift their hands in pious horror
over conventional un-Christianity. The conventions are often merely
truths that have got the sleeping-sickness; but by this very fact they
are disabled as regards any useful purpose. Every great leader,
whether in religion or in the reform of society, comes to us with
living truths to take the place of conventions. He gives the lie to
our bread-and-butter existence, and teaches us to be shocked by most
things to which we are accustomed and many things which we have
treasured. Society progresses only in so far as it learns to be
shocked, not by other people, but by itself. What did England ever
gain except a purr or a glow from being shocked by French morals or
German manners? The English taste for being shocked is only worth its
weight in old iron when it is directed on some thing such as the
procession of the poor and the ill-clad that circulates from morning
till night in the streets of English slums. Being shocked is a maker
of revolutions and literatures when men are shocked by the right
things--or, rather, by the wrong things. Out of a mood of shock came
Blake's fiery rout of proverbs in that poem which begins:

A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

It is, unfortunately, not the Robin Redbreast in a cage that shocks us
most now. It is rather the Robin Redbreast which revolts against being
expected to sit behind bars and sing like a mechanical toy. Our
resurrection as men and women will begin when we learn to be shocked
by our mechanical servitudes, as Ruskin and Morris used to be in their
fantastic way, instead of being shocked, as we are at present--the
conventionally good, the conventionally bad, and the conventionally
artistic who are too pallid to be either--by what are really only our
immortal souls. At our present stage of evolution, Heaven would shock
us far more than earth has succeeded in doing. That is at once our
condemnation and our comedy.

XIX

CONFESSIONS

Father Hugh Benson has been praised for his courage in confessing that
he could not read Sir Walter Scott. Surely this must be a world of
lies if it is remarkable to find a man honest in so simple a matter as
his tastes in literature. All but one--or it may even be a few
hundred--we are under the empire of shame, which withers truth upon
our lips and threatens us with the rack if we do not confess things
that are lies. That is the reason why in any given year we