for a livelihood. Thus it always seems strained to speak of the
religious convictions of a clergyman, because nine out of ten
clergymen have no religions convictions: they are ordinary
officials carrying on a routine of baptizing, marrying, and
churching; praying, reciting, and preaching; and, like solicitors
or doctors, getting away from their duties with relief to hunt,
to garden, to keep bees, to go into society, and the like. In the
same way many people do cruel and vile things without being in
the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have
been brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile. To say that
every man who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs
a pupil is a conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull,
conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because
they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be
beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at
and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying),
and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection
beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect
truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common
condition of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of
flagellation among people who not only do not lust after it, but
who hit the harder because they are angry at having to perform an
uncomfortable duty. These people will beat merely to assert their
authority, or to carry out what they conceive to be a divine
order on the strength of the precept of Solomon recorded in the
Bible, which carefully adds that Solomon completely spoilt his
own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the
sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as