is necessary on the very threshold of the definition of ideals.
For owing to that historic fallacy with which I have just dealt,
numbers of readers will expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound
a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal.
There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists,
which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one
of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried
out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth.
There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun;
and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day
in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals.
There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal,
and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact,
and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be
a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it.
It is true of both the cases I have quoted, and of every case.
The pagans had always adored purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was
when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice purity that they
rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals.
The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost;
it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington,
by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings
went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine
of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified
them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore,
is the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old
as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous,
and as new as the New Jerusalem.