THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love

and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must

needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I

suppose Iam a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I

hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast

by religious organisations. All my life has been darkened by

irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and

exclusions. Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I

suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the

Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the

anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality. It is their

exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that

inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one

and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the

household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical

goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty

difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a

damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the

believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful

are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books,

from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly

instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only by isolating its

flock can the organisation survive.

Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I

remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of

print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that

ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with

one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the

uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and

attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the

missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in

the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that

shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an

outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all

admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their force of

sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful

intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for

Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism,

or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would

be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and

terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with

boldly invented last words,-the most unscrupulous lying; there

would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety"

lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced

their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads

people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.

Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual

love. My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and

anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to

unintelligent pestering…

2

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It

was at one of the weekly di

the Blackfriars.

I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the

man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor

of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an

influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He

was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which

I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,

with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple

sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with

considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was

underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the

swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After di

he a little forced himself upon me. At that time, though the shadow

of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for

great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and

anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to make

him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran,

but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to

put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you

know, very narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express

judicious regret. "One has to consider them carefully, one has to

respect their attitudes. One dare not go too far with them. One

has to feel one's way."

He chummed and the moustache bristled.

A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered

there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and

clothed and educated…

I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it

seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my

boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-

chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed,

were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday

opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and