Various

“ But to love an abstraction (such as Humanity, the Poor, the Nation, Evolution) , is to marry oneself to nihilism, mechanism and metaphysics: it is to immerse one’s personality in an ocean of imagination. What is Humanity, anyway? ”

“ The free spirits say: “There is nothing we would rather do than love our neighbor, if you mean by that, one, or even several, individuals. Such a love makes life worth while. But we refuse, quite frankly, to love our Neighbor, meaning thereby a whole city, or a nation, or a continent. Such love only gives rise to international jealousies, and is a cause of wars.” In other words, the free spirits think that only fools and fanatics can be in love with grand, sweeping, meaningless abstractions. We can love individuals. ”

“ So we take our stand, not only against that distortion of the Christian doctrine which permits of calling “all good men” Christians; not only against the strict Christian doctrine which stands for the effete virtues of Faith, Charity, Love, and Humility; but also against a more pernicious mixture of the two which is tending, by means of Dry Laws and Common Freshman Years, to undermine the integrity of the individual. You say, we are not idealists. Ah, but we are idealists. But we believe that ideals are only vital in so far as they are individualized (i.e., belong to an individual) . ”

“ Bench had been tactfully dismissed for the night, the young blood Ardrath and his serious-minded companion took a long walk along the bay of Leghorn. “It was on this bay that Shelley lost his life while sailing,” recited George with the air of a very efficient but somehow uninspiring courier. “In his pocket was a book of his friend Keats’s poems, doubled back at the one called ‘St. Agnes’s Eve’. You know—‘St. Agnes’s Eve, ah, bitter chill it was!’”
“How romantic!” offered Irma. “I suppose you’d like to be drowned here too, and be cremated like Sam McGee (blasphemous thought!) .” ”

“ The Christians, with the supreme perspicacity of their kind (one must have the insight of a Jew to be a Christian!) —the Christians have sensed the danger to which their doctrine has been recently subjected by modern science, and seeing that there is no hope in the open battle-field, have had recourse to an ingenious subterfuge. They say that all good men are Christians: that is, they do not say it brazenly, but they imply it. I have several times heard the most extreme atheist of my acquaintance surnamed “Christian” [109] by one of these canny believers. ”

“ They were walking on a ledge that overhung the bay now, and the blue water of the Mediterranean gleamed in the moonlight thirty feet below. Irma looked at it, and a devilish glint came into her eye.
“George, if I jump into the sea, will you come after me?”
Assuredly this was carrying things too far, thought Ardrath. Irma had again taken him too seriously. But he maintained his poise.
“Of course; but don’t be a fool.”
“I hate sensible people,” she replied. “They always do the obvious thing. ”

“ They believe that to find fault with human nature for not responding to Christianity (in the strict sense of the word) is but to blame the patient for not being cured by the medicine. For instance, this love of your neighbor—that fictitious personage who haunts the domicile of the imagination, dressed in a black suit and a derby—this love of neighbor, is nothing but one of those abstractions which the later day Christians—the amorphous Christians—have made in order to satisfy the dictates of strict Christianity. ”

“ You don’t look overjoyed to see me, George, or are you overcome by the shock?”
“Nonsense, Irma; you surprised me, that’s all. I was in the clouds just now, reciting Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ to myself, to the intense annoyances of all the Livornian traffic-policemen (I presume that’s what they call the creatures) . Where are you staying, Mrs. Bench?”
[121]
“We’re at the Continental, George; do come up and see us some time. We don’t know a soul, and it’s terribly lonely.” ”

“ The case is not one for argument; it is a question of faith. We have faith in Christ’s arguments. We believe that in spirit we are still Christians, although in the letter of the law we are pharisees. We assign to ourselves the pompous right of interpretation and revision (annihilation?) of the original doctrine: and this in spite of our vaunted humility! Christ, we say, meant well. We mean well. Therefore we are Christians. The argument is dismissed, and condition number three is satisfied.
What is a Christian? ”

“ We are neither scholars, nor scholists to argue angels off the needle’s point. I mean that if either of us allowed ourselves a woman’s love, there would be moments when God’s purpose would be farthest from our minds. ”

“ An unfortunate state of affairs, which for the sake of our racial mental integrity should be altered! But why does it exist? What are the causes of this inertia—this posthumous belief?
The causes can be readily wrapped and bundled into one cause—human nature. It is human nature to want to believe in a God. It is human nature to accept a system of belief handed down from generation to generation. It is human nature to overcome the inconsistencies and the logical difficulties of such a [108] belief as peremptorily as possible. ”

“ One does not literally offer the other cheek; one does not literally love one’s neighbor as oneself, etc. Condition number two is satisfied by a shifting of our original positions. We are no longer literal Christians; we are liberal Christians. In other words, we are not Christians at all; we have nailed Christ to our cross, not to His own. We have distorted His doctrine in order to fit our modern twentieth century. ”

“ Peter Neale is the writer of a sporting column in a New York newspaper. He falls in love with Maria Algarez, a dancer, and chiefly by virtue of the fact that he praises her as much as she demands, persuades her to marry him. When their baby is born, she runs away to Europe to have her career, unfettered by the cares of maternity. Peter unselfishly devotes himself to the care of the boy. It is his ambition that he shall grow up to be a Harvard athlete, and finally inherit his father’s column. ”

“ For the past hundred years the Christians have been romantically chanting about the salvation of it. But it is time now that the world wake up to the fact that Humanity is not an inclusive term meaning all individuals: it is, rather, a generalization meaning non-individuality. ”

“ After we had walked a mile or so I turned to Rabnon and said, “You are right. A woman will drive our God out of the heart of a man. For a woman is God to a man who is in love.” Rabnon very seriously and apparently irrelevantly, answered as he looked into my face, “We must travel far to-day, my friend.”
And because I was a maudlin artist I could not help writing a soft breeze into the trees that stood by the wayside so that they sighed and shivered as we went down a hill and left Camereau behind us.
[131]
I look up and see that dawn is coming in at the window ”

“ In other words, the free spirits do not care to compromise their position. They take pride in their own intellectual integrity. They agree with Christ in some respects. But they look upon the Christian pill as altogether too large for a sane man to swallow. ”

“ The technical construction that underlies the poet’s exotic color and temperament, is emphasized by Hearn as a proof of Rossetti’s energetic intellect.
Swinburne is classified as the greatest English verse writer, scholar, critic, and living dramatist. He is a pessimistic evolutionist preaching almost an immoral law, contrasting vividly with George Meredith. As a further contrast the problem of evil is approached by Swinburne much in the same way as the German philosopher Nietzsche. ”

“ If you had been obsessed by an idea, and it had been forming and churning in your mind for days and days, and suddenly—presto!—there it is in the flesh—” I waved my hand, and turned back to my scrutiny of my lady. ”

“ Our critic finds an optimistic pantheism and an intense individualism in Browning and paraphrases excellently some of his poems, but there is, unfortunately, no consideration of Browning’s paradoxical interpretation of Love. William Morris’s “refuge from life” in art and artistry in Norse subjects are translated into expressive prose. “No man ever worked harder for romantic literature and romantic art, and few men have made so deep an impression into the aesthetic sentiments of the English public.” ”

“ Men are practicing economy. It’s a good habit to encourage. But there’s no sound economy in mere “cheapness” which usually ends in decided extravagance. Our clothes are all-wool, well tailored, correctly styled. They are genuinely economical. ”

“ For the same period ending July, 1922, the membership was 1696.
On January 18th, 1923, the membership was 1905, and men are still joining.
Why stay out when a membership will save you manifold times the cost of the fee.
THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE Contents JANUARY, 1923
[107]
The Yale Literary Magazine
EDITORS
BUSINESS MANAGERS
Leader It is unfortunately not true to say that the only friend to the Christian is a Christian. Everyone, with the exception of a few free spirits like Gibbon or Nietzsche, has befriended the Christian by virtue of his own inertia ”