None the less, here also, men have very manfully forced that slippery shirk optimism to help out with logic's work. And so have men always been assured that these overlords would by and by arrange everything satisfactorily; and that the door at the far end of the corridor opened, when you also had done with alcoves, and when you also had perforce passed through, upon one or another delightful vista. The fact has been divinely revealed, or in any event has the authentic Ingoldsbean support of one or another leading citizen who "well remembers to have heard his grandmother say that 'Somebody told her so.'" ... And men have preferred to accept the revelation rather than to recollect that, by all current accounts, the deity accredited with this revelation is not elsewhere remarkable for truthful dealings. Men have, out of so many thousand years of speculation, contrived no surer creed than Coignard's creed, that "in matters of faith it is necessary to believe blindly." Men have discovered no firmer hope than that, in defiance of all logic and of all human experience, something very pleasant may still be impending, in--need I say?--bright lands which are in nothing familiar. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: John S. (Sexton?) Sumner; other authorities state that Sex was his middle name; secretary of the then notorious New York State Society for the Suppression of Vice.] [Footnote 6: Archæologist of the period. Mencken has several mentions of him.] [Footnote 7: Of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry.] [Footnote 8: Itinerant clergyman of the day, who preached a species of Christianity.] VI ROMANTICS ABOUT THEM "He has more authorities than those whose names he has given. These are, however, a few: Alcmæon of Crotona; Dionysius of Apollonia; Herodorus of Heracleum in Pontus, the father of Bryson the sophist; Ctesias of Cnidos; Herodotus of Halicarnassus; Syennesis of Cyprus; Polybus; Democritus of Abdera; Anaxagoras of Clazomene; Empedocles of Sicily; and many more which do not just now occur to my memory." _6._ _Romantics About Them_ § 52 The literary artist plays, I repeated, with death. But I had not meant only in a religious way: I had not meant merely that the artist lovingly carves the beads, and polishes the rhetoric of the prayer-books, with which not merely the aged delight to play in turn. And I had not meant, either, to dwell so long upon orthodox religious diversions, since reputable religion is of necessity, like any other popular fashion, an ever-varying unstable affair. One sect alone--made up of true believers in the everywhere underlying, and the really religious principle, as I interpreted it, of the Biography,--seemed not ever to have varied in its faith. I was thinking of the immodest, impotent, and internecine sect of literary artists. And I could, I believed, best indicate the two main tenets of the literary artist's religion by a rather roundabout approach. § 53