And now for these three hundred years the Men of Dreams have been
watching the Christian Ideal go bankrupt. One by one as they have dared,
and each according to his mood, they have spoken their minds; some have
reasoned, and some have laughed, and some have appealed, logician,
satirist, and exhorter all feeling in their several ways that humanity
stood in need of a new moral ideal. Consciously or unconsciously, within
the pale of the Church or without, this has been "the spirit moving upon
the face of the waters" within them, and at last the creation is come
forth, the dream that is to touch the heart-strings of the World anew,
and make it sing a stronger song than any it has sung of old. Mark you,
it must be stronger, wider, deeper, or it cannot be at all. It must sing
all that has been sung, and something more. Its mission is not to deny
the past but to reaffirm it and explain it, all of it; and to-day too,
and to-morrow too.
And this Ideal, the only one that has power to stir the moral pulses of
the world, the only Word that can quicken "Dead Souls" who wait this
moral resurrection, the only Word which can animate the dreamer, poet,
sculptor, painter, musician, artist of chisel or pen, with power to
fashion forth his dream, is =Anarchism=. For Anarchism means fulness of
being. It means the return of Greek radiance of life, Greek love of
beauty, without Greek indifference to the common man; it means Christian
earnestness and Christian Communism, without Christian fanaticism and
Christian gloom and tyranny. It means this because it means perfect
freedom, material and spiritual freedom.
The light of Greek idealism failed because with all its love of life and
the infinite diversity of beauty, and all the glory of its free
intellect, it never conceived of material freedom; to it the Helot was
as eternal as the Gods. Therefore the Gods passed away, and their
eternity was as a little wave of time.
The Christian ideal has failed because with all its sublime Communism,
its doctrine of universal equality, it was bound up with a spiritual
tyranny seeking to mould into one pattern the thoughts of all humanity,
stamping all men with the stamp of submission, throwing upon all the
dark umber of _life lived for the purpose of death_, and fruitful of all
other tyrannies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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