All our ordinary
intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember during the
Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen's Hall, and
giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it one of the
incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman
amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there is
something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to give
his time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture of
Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their
opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of
opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It is
that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite specially
strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can only
be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all the
current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man is
seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive,
it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses of
his mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiled
and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces,
the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental
honesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of
pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere.
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