We look through another peephole that makes men out as angels,
and we call it the New Theology. But if we pull down some dusty old
books from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mildewed leaves, and
if in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale about
a complete man, such a man as is walking on the pavement outside, we
suddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone
age.
The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's "Gin
Lane" or "Stages of Cruelty," or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, "God's dreadful judgment" against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that morality
is somehow merely a matter of human taste--an accident of psychology.
And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to
praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there
is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme.
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