Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it
will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . .
Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the
disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore
nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature
has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his
theoretical objection to capital punishment a lust to murder all
who disagree with him.
Beware of sentiment! Beware of it in politics, beware of it in religion.
See things as they are. Accept human nature for what it is. Consult
history. Judge by reason and experience. Act with courage.
As he faces politics, so he faces religion.
He desires to rescue Christianity from all the sentimental vulgarities
which have disfigured it in recent years--alike from the aesthetic
extravagances of the ritualist and the organising fussiness of the
evangelical; to rescue it from these obscuring unessentials, and to set
it clearly before the eyes of mankind in the pure region of thought--a
divine philosophy which teaches the only true science of life, a
discipline which fits the Soul for its journey, "by an inner ascent," to
the presence of God. Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate,
objective truth, or it is nothing.
Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind.
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