The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX So this is where we are got to after these six thousand, or six thousand billion years (as the case may be), that, asking for bread, one man gives us the stone of Homoiousios and another the half-baked brick of Amphioxus. Both are in a way rationalists. Wolff gives us idea unsupported by fact, and argues about it for year after year; Treacle does the same thing for fact unsupported by idea. Nor does the one escape the final bankruptcy of reason more than the other. While the theologian vainly tries to shuffle the problem of evil, the Rationalist is compelled to ascribe to his perfect monad the tendency to divide into opposite forces. The éi8e plays leapfrog with the é, as the & has vaulted over the bar of the woAAa and the wav. So the whole argument breaks up into a formidably ridiculous logomachy, and we are left in doubt as to whether the universe is (after all) bound together by causal or contingent links, or whether in truth we are not gibbering lunatics in an insane chaos of hallucination. And just as we think we are rid of the priggishness of Matthew Arnold and Edwin Arnold and all the pragmatic pedants and Priscilla-scented lavenderians, up jumps some renegade monk, proclaims himself the Spirit of the Twentieth Century, and replaces the weak tea of the past by his own stinking cabbage- water, It seems useless nowadays to call for a draught of the right Wine of Tacchus. The Evangelicals object to the wine, and the Rationalists to the God. We had filed off the fetter, and while the sores yet burn, find another heavier iron yet firmer on the other foot—as Stevenson so magnificently parabled unto us. Then how this nauseous stinkard quibbles ! This defender of truth! How he delights with apish malice to write “in England,” wishing his hearers to understand “Great Britain” ; and when taxed with the malignant lie against his brother which he had thus cunningly insinuated, to point out gleefully that “ England ” does not include “Scotland.” Indeed a triumph of the Reason ! And why all this pother? To reduce all men to their own lumpishness. These louts of the intelligence !_ These clods—Clodds! My good fellows, it is certainly necessary to plough a field sometimes. But not all the year round! We don’t want the furrows ; we want the grain. And (for God’s sake !) if you must be ploughmen, at least let us have the furrows straight ! Do you really think you have helped us much when you have shown that a horse is really the same as a cow, only different? 388