estrict the
restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more
and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for
it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of
the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus
the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much
Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but
by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was
bound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, a
large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from
Christendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing
buttons. I do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose,
for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritan
body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. I
was going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot
bring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would object
to wearing badges. But the point is that as the holy spirit of
progressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented a
new objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to
the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. And from them
it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise
and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of
trouser-buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because it is
recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. That
is the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-century
sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evident
enemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that the
majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always
right. Progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people are
prophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism
anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the
people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that
kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people
are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their
own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the
ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to som