Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological PentateuchShaw, Bernard
Philosophy
Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch
Shaw, Bernard
Drama
If dwindling sects like
the Church of England, the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and the
rest, persist in trying to cramp the human mind within the limits of
these grotesque perversions of natural truths and poetic metaphors, then
they must be ruthlessly banished from the schools until they either
perish in general contempt or discover the soul that is hidden in every
dogma. The real Class War will be a war of intellectual classes; and its
conquest will be the souls of the children.
A TOUCHSTONE FOR DOGMA
The test of a dogma is its universality. As long as the Church of
England preaches a single doctrine that the Brahman, the Buddhist, the
Mussulman, the Parsee, and all the other sectarians who are British
subjects cannot accept, it has no legitimate place in the counsels of
the British Commonwealth, and will remain what it is at present, a
corrupter of youth, a danger to the State, and an obstruction to the
Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. This has never been more strongly felt
than at present, after a war in which the Church failed grossly in the
courage of its profession, and sold its lilies for the laurels of the
soldiers of the Victoria Cross. All the cocks in Christendom have been
crowing shame on it ever since; and it will not be spared for the sake
of the two or three faithful who were found even among the bishops. Let
the Church take it on authority, even my authority (as a professional
legend maker) if it cannot see the truth by its own light: no dogma can
be a legend. A legend can pass an ethnical frontier as a legend, but not
as a truth; whilst the only frontier to the currency of a sound dogma as
such is the frontier of capacity for understanding it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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