The military spirit does not mean obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility.
Most common things will be found to be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing a peacock [plume] by calling it blue. There is blue in it… The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part, and go home to their tea.
For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live tomorrow.
In the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because the have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have not wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick and the dead.
The egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist . Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.
You politicians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals.
The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
Religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in.
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