st, but a negro
can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the
Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the
manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it
could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute
democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood,
in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black
bishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual
privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a
monkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic
democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more
democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is
indestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was
destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to
destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly
moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old
tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story
about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, 'The
Serpent.' But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern
answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding
it. 'Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason that
they never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos,
and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the
real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin's _Origin of
Species_.' And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to
the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the
Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by
means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad.
Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the
literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think
the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that
of the prehistoric 'strongest man' who could fight a hundred men. But I
do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the
form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an
appe