r."

"Ought I to betray the truth, when it is clear to me?"

"Truth, my poor friend! No, don't look at me like that, I shall not
follow Pilate's example, and ask: What is Truth? Like you, and longer
than you perhaps, I have loved her. But Truth, my dear Sir, is higher
than you, than I, than all those that ever have, or ever will inhabit
the earth. We may believe that we obey the Great Goddess, but in
fact we serve only the _Di minores_, the saints in the side chapels,
alternately adored and neglected by the crowd. The one in honour of
whom men are now killing and mutilating themselves in a Corybantic
frenzy, can evidently be no longer yours nor mine. The ideal of the
Country is a god, great and cruel, who will leave to the future the
image of a sort of bugaboo Cronos, or of his Olympian son whom Christ
superseded. Your ideal of humanity is the highest rung of the ladder,
the announcement of the new god--who will be dethroned later on by one
higher still, who will embrace more of the universe. The ideal and
life never cease to evolve, and this continual advance forms the
genuine interest of the world to the liberal mind; but if the mind can
constantly rise without rest or interruption, in the world of fact
progress is made step by step, and a scant few inches are gained in
the whole of a lifetime. Humanity limps along, and your mistake, the
only one, is that you are two or three days' journey ahead of it,
but--perhaps with good reason--that is one of the mistakes most
difficult to forgive. When an ideal, like that of Country, begins
to age with the form of society to which it is strongly bound, the
slightest attack makes it ferocious, and it will blaze out furiously
in its exasperation. The reason is that it has already begun to
doubt itself. Do not deceive yourself; these millions of men who are
slaughtering each other now in the name of patriotism, have no longer
the early enthusiasm of 1792, or 1813, even though there is more noise
and ruin today. Many of those who die, and those who send them to
their death, feel in their hearts the horrible touch of doubt; but
entangled as they are, too weak to escape, or even to imagine a way of
salvation, they proclaim their injured faith with a kind of despair,
and throw themselves blindly into the abyss. They would like to throw
in also those who first raised doubts in them by words or actions. To
wish to destroy the dream of those who are dying for its sake, is to
wish to kil