y and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to
describe at any time. But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in
our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly
difficult to find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels
the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all
the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost
unspeakably unimportant. The nearest approach to it in our ordinary
life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere
humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say, after a
somewhat disturbing discovery, "There is a dead man under the sofa."
We should not be likely to say, "There is a dead man of considerable
personal refinement under the sofa." We should say, "A woman has fallen
into the water." We should not say, "A highly educated woman has
fallen into the water." Nobody would say, "There are the remains of a
clear thinker in your back garden." Nobody would say, "Unless you hurry
up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped
off that cliff." But this emotion, which all of us have in connection
with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and
constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. It was
native to St. Francis of Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman. In
this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to
pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one
commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one
civilization much more than another civilization. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Franciscans. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so little as ours.

Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally
undemocratic quality. In religion and morals we should admit, in the
abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or
perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in
practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is
that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the
ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the
educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of
intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it
more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such
thing as the sin of pride, because it