Neither made a pretence of
anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity.
Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe
than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which
their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist,
communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no
relation; if anarchists needed order, they must go back to the
twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its thousand
years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have
no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature
itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault of being so
supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty could
scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order -- except the
Church -- had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the
conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own.
Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner
or Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men
have been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such
refinements were Greek or German, and affected the practical
American but little. He admitted that, for the moment, the
darkness was dense.
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