Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/169

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Our Relation to the Sacred Tribe
165

and suffering are the greatest boons that life has to offer. This and his other published works were hailed by many as a new Gospel. He next proceeded to state, in conversations and in private lectures, that "Heaven looks down on no sight so cursed as a happy home;" because, he said, in order to keep home happy, men ignore the claims of strangers. Finally, he propounded certain theories of sublime self-abnegation, which have, in one way or another, been the ruin of nearly all who paid any attention to them.

The career of such men becomes more intelligible, when one knows that James Hinton habitually went out in winter insufficiently clad, not in order to give his great-coat to a beggar, but to give himself the pleasure of suffering from cold. James Hinton would have been a useful subordinate in any well-organized school of Philosophy; unfortunately we have in England no well-organized Schools; and a large circle set Hinton up, for a time, as Leader. Now when a community has arrived at such a condition that men can be set up as thought-leaders who are born without the healthy appetite for self-preservation which is the necessary physical basis of all knowledge of the means by which society is preserved, that community needs to be taken in hand and controlled by the influence (one might almost say, by the magnetism) of a morally sane race. In ordinary times, Judaism keeps itself in the background, and leaves Gentile thought to develop in its own way. But when Philosophy has evaporated into the fourth dimension, when it has played with the Eternal till it has shrivelled out of itself the perception alike of locality and of epoch, of possibility and of sequence, of perspective and of proportion,