All the hope of improvement in
the twentieth century looks to a continued growth of that sentiment. It
becomes a veritable passion in certain natures, as long as there are
large and cruel evils to redress; and this passion of a few leading
spirits, communicating something of its fire to the colder mass, is the
great cause of progress. Surely that is the correct interpretation of
the progressive life of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? Men
realised that to cultivate sympathy because it was enjoined by religion
was a more or less mercantile procedure: it was worth cultivating for
its own sake.
Here we have the reply to those who, unfamiliar with any but their own
religious environment, ask what place there will be for sympathy in an
intellectual or nationalistic age. It is a very grave error to suppose
either that our age is becoming less emotional or that Rationalism has
no place for emotions. In pursuing its task during the nineteenth
century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K.
Chesterton, in his _Victorian Age in Literature_, speaks of J. S. Mill's
"hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very
many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably
unjust.
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