Collected Works (Vol. II)

TIME 271 Scept, 1? soul, no! Myst. Then how do you know all. this about the earth? Goodness gracious bless my How few among us can reach the supreme sanity of Dr. Henry Maudsley in such a book ‘¢ Life in Mind and Conduct ”! ” Hence I regard Agnosticism as little more than a basis of new research into spiritual facts, to be conducted by the methods won for us by men of science. I would define myself as an agnostic with a future. But to the enthymeme itself. enough to expose it. Other things have been hated before and since Christ lived —if he lived. Slavery was hated. A million men* died about it, and it was cast out of everywhere but the hearts of men.t Euripides hated Greek religion, and he killed the form thereof. Does Our J.ogician argue from these facts the vitality of slavery or Delphi? Yes, perhaps, when Simon Legree and the Pythoness were actually making money, but to argue their eternal truth, or even their value at that time, is a further and a false step. Does the fact that a cobra is alive prove it tobe innocuous? With the reported murder of Jesus of Naza- rethI am not concerned; but Vespasian’s ‘*Ut puto Deus fio” is commonly thought to have been meant as a jest. Our Romanticist’s unique and magnificent dramatisation of the war between the sceptic or lover of truth, and the religious man or lover of life, may be well quoted against me. Though Vespasian did jest, though Christ’s ‘‘It is finished” were subjectively but the cry of his physical weakness, like Burton's ‘‘ I am a dead man,” it is no less true that millions have regarded it as indeed a cry of triumph. That is so, subjectively for them, but no more, and the one fact does not alter the other. Surely Our Fid. Def. will find little support in this claim on behalf of death. We all die; it was the Resurrection and Ascension which stamped Christ as God. Our Philosopher will, I think, fight shy of these events. The two thieves were ‘‘nailed up like vermin”’ on either side of Christ by precisely the same people; are they also gods? To found a religion on the fact of death, murder though it were, is hardly more than African fetichism. Does death prove more than life? Will Mr. Ches- terton never be happy until he is hanged? These then are the rear-guard actions of his retiring and beaten army. A word is * In the American Civil War, 1861-64. were not men, only Americans. t Thisis mere rhetoric. Crowley was perfectly familiar with the conditions of ‘‘ free” wage labour. But they Scept. Astronomers are: paid, insufficiently paid, it is true, but still paid, to calculate the movements of the various heavenly bodies. These, being regular, or regularly irregular, The army itself is pretty well out of sight. There is a puff of artillery from afar to the effect that ‘‘no man can contrive to be agnostic about Christianity.” This is very blank car- tridge. Who is agnostic about the shape of the earth? Who prides himself upon a pro- found reserve about the colour of a blue pig, or hesitates to maintain that grass is green? Unless under the reservation that both subject and predicate are Unknowable in their essence, and that the copula of identity is but a conven- tion—a form of Agnosticism which after all means nothing in this connection, for the terms — of the criticism require the same reservation. Our Tamburlaine’s * subsequent.remark that the poor infidel (failing in his desperate attempt to beagnostic) ‘‘ tries to provesomethinguntrue”’ is a petitio principiz which would be a blunder in a schoolboy; but ina man of Our Dialec- tician’s intelligence can only be impudence. The main army, as I said, is out of sight. There is, however, a cloud of dust on the horizon which may mark its position. ‘‘ Does Mr. Crowley suppose that the Buddhists do not feel the poetical nature of the books of religion?” I take this to mean: ‘‘ You have no business to take the Bible literally !” I have dealt with this contention at some length in the ‘‘Sword of Song”’ itself (Ascen- sion Day, lines 216-247): but here I will simply observe that a poem which authorises the Archbishop of Canterbury to convey Dr. Clitford’s pet trowels, and makes possible the Gilbertian (in the old sense of pertaining to W. S. Gilbert) position of the Free Kirk to-day, is a poem which had better be burnt, as the most sensible man of his time proposed to do with Homer, or at least left to the collector, as I believe is the case with the pub- lications of the late Isidore Liseux. Immoral is indeed no word for it. It is as criminal as the riddle in ‘‘ Pericles.” That Our Pantosympatheticist is himself an Agnostic does not excuse him. True, if every one thought as he does there would be no formal religion in the world, but only that individual communion of the consciousness with its self-consciousness which constitutes genuine religion, and should never inflame passion or inspire intolerance, since the non- Ego lies beyond its province. But he knows as well as I do that there are thousands in this country who would gladly * Not to confuse with Tambourine or alter into Tamburlesque.