Mr. Crowley and The Creeds

— 5 — that I end up literally raving. My book is possibly difficult in many ways, but only Mr. Chesterton would have tried to understand it by reading it backward. Repartee apart, it is surely an ascertainable fact that while the first 29 pages are almost exclusively occupied with an attack on Christianity as bitter and violent as I can make it, the remaining 161 are composed of (a) an attack on materialism, (b) an essay in metaphysics opposing advaitism, (c) an attempt to demonstrate the close analogy between the canonical Buddhist doctrine and that of modern Agnostics. None of these deal with Christianity at all, save for a chance and casual word. I look forward with pleasure to a new History of England, in which it will be pointed out how the warlike enthusiasm aroused by the Tibetan expedition led to the disastrous plunge into the Boer War ; disastrous because he separa- tion of the Transvaal which resulted therefrom left us so weak that we fell an easy prey to William the Conqueror. Our Novelist should really make a strong effort to materialise his creation in “ The Napoleon of Notting Hill ” of the gentlemen weeping by the graves of their descendents. Any sound philosophy must be first destructive of previous error, then constructive by harmonising truths into Truth. Nor can the human mind rest content with negation ; I honour him rather whose early emotion is hatred of Christianity, bred of compulsion to it, but who subdues that negative passion and forces his way to a positive creed, were it but the cult of Kali or Priapus. Here, indeed, modern Agnostics are at fault. They sensibly enough reject error ; but they are over-proud of their lofty attitude, and, letting slip the real problems of life, busy themselves with side-issues, or try to satisfy the spiritual part of the brain (which needs food like any other part) with the husks of hate. How few among us can reach the supreme sanity of Dr. Henry Maudsley in such a book as “ 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. A word is 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 every- where but the hearts of men. Euripides hated Greek religion, and he killed the form thereof. Does Our Logician argue from these facts the vitality of slavery or Delphi ? Yes, perhaps, when Simon Legree and the Pythoness were