keep away
from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of
our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of
creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary
unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been
nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two
homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is
One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a
good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds
into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as
such (because it was his "temperament"), and he would turn up later with
three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it
would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It
would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there
was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for
a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong)
they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a
Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other
than before.

It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides
men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in
clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a
Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is
Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime
atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its
way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but
healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I
am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly
pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for
disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the
very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard
to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that
always yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal
prejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against
this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a
resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be