One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found
the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never
found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing
evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all.
This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was called
progress.
Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find them
in historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any one
who comes before a strong movement as the "forerunner" of that movement.
That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a great
army. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,
for whom the phrase "forerunner" was rather peculiarly invented. Equally
obviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divine
event: otherwise the forerunner would be a founder. Unless Jesus had
been the Baptist's God, He would simply have been his disciple.
Nevertheless the fallacy of the "forerunner" has been largely used in
literature. Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a
"morning star of the Reformation," or some such rubbish; whereas the
Reformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland.
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