the spelling which we still use, they were thinking of their own pyre, or funeral fire, and dimly or clearly recognising in the pyramid a granite flame. In this way it comes about that he who has this pyramid upon the brain is rightly called a Puritan. For there are more Rhymes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by etymology.

Now, as I have said, the pyramid is the Black man's word, and it does no harm to the Black man. When the black Puritan takes a vow of celibacy, and tortures and starves himself to death in the lethal chamber of the monastery, he is acting for the benefit of mankind, and doing just what science ought to wish him to do. I hold it unscientific, and I am sure it is inhuman, to drag him out of his own self-chosen lethal chamber, and put him into some other one devised by us; and it is the very crime of crimes to order him to go out into the world and beget children, for us to torture and imprison and lethalise in their turn.

The Black man has learnt this lesson long ago, and so he can worship the fakir without becoming one. But the White man's natural symbol is the living flame, and not the granite one. He is a raw apprentice in fakir-worship, and a blunderer. And so the White fakir wants to make every one else a fakir against their will; and he takes a vow of marriage, that he may beget children and train them up as fakirs. That is his mistake, and that is the mistake to be set right.

The White fakir is less thorough-going than the Black fakir, but he is a lesser nuisance to himself in order that he may be a greater nuisance to his

neighbours. And so we find that what the White man has gained in freedom of thought he has lost in freedom of action. The Puritan thinks what he likes, and the Catholic does what he likes, like the Prussians and Frederick the Great.

The Black mind seems to be past curing. They that are sick unto death need not a physician. It is a case for the altruistic principle once more. I want to untighten the Puritan brain, because I think it is the brain of a good man.

NINETEENTH HEAD

THE ECLIPSE

The New Religion.

1. White and Black.

2. Afri

4. Prophecy.

can Tales. 3. The End of the World.

5. The Heretic.

Evidently it is not the business of Idealism to furnish mankind with a new religion.

The new religion is already with us. It has been with us for some hundreds of years. It is no longer struggling for a footing. It is partly established by law. It has always had its heretics, and it has for some time been persecuting them. Men are being sent to jail in England, while I write, for fidelity towards Christianity, and infidelity towards Science.

The old religion bade men, when their friends were ill, to pray to the Man Outside in words. The new religion bids them to pray in drugs. And when they obey the old religion, and disobey the new, and their friends happen to die, the law sends them to jail.

The new religion has won its way over the old by sheer business merit. Its spells are stronger than those of the old religion. They work better.

They bind the Man Outside more surely. The prayers of the new religion are more often answered. The priests of the old religion themselves have learnt that. When they want to bind the Man Outside not to strike their church with lightning, they no longer trust to the prayers written in their book. They borrow the iron prayer of Science; and that prayer climbs above the church; and, like a trail of ivy, sucks the strength out of the church.

The new spells are stronger than the old spells because they are braver. They do not treat the Man Outside as though he were a half-savage tyrant, ruling by fits and starts, and swayed this way and that by the flatteries of his courtiers. They treat him as a Man who, on the whole, knows his own mind, and means us to know it, and gives his prizes for discernment and not for flattery. And so the new prayer does not cast itself on its knees saying -"Thy will be done:" it lifts its iron finger to the skies with the proud challenge,-" Touch me if you

can!"

The new prayers are more businesslike than the old, because they are written to please the Man Outside and not the Man Inside. And they use the language which the Man Outside seems to understand best, the language of deeds, not words.

They are sincere prayers. They ask for what men really want, and not for what they pretend to want, or fear the Man Outside wants them to want. Hence they are not so often put up out of vanity, and so as to be heard of men, as the old prayers.

Above all they are truthful prayers. They are not attempts to hoodwink the Man Outside. The plum

ber does not lay down a dummy drain, and hope the Man Outside will mistake it for a real drain. He may break the sanitary laws, but he does not think he can break the Law of Health.

And the new prayers have all these merits because they try, on the whole, to be true prayers. Verihood is the foundation of the new religion. The Man Outside is revealing himself to us by a new name, and Verihood is that name.

Between these two religions how does the Idealist stand?

I

It is significant that the new religion comes from the North. It breathes the sheer courage and intense love of life of those old Vikings who prayed to die in battle, and not a cow's death on the straw. It is on the whole the rebellion of the Baltic against the Mediterranean mind.

For that reason the Idealist will not want it to end in the harsh conquest of the Mediterranean by the Baltic mind. We have heard too much of world religions. The world can do very well without another Catholic Church. The Northern folk are the