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III. The struggle for existence assures "the survival of the best, the victory of the fittest," and this results in an aristocratic hierarchic gradation of selected individuals a continuous progress instead of the democratic, collectivist leveling of socialism. Paris, 1879, page 110 et seq.
But here in Spain the earliest forms of Christian externals crystallized, as it were; they were thrust, like an insult or a challenge, against the Asiatic as the reconquest of the desolated province proceeded; and therefore in every Spanish church you have, side by side with the Christian riot of art, this original hierarchic and secret thing, almost shocking to a Northerner, the choir, the Coro, with high solemn walls shutting out the people from the priests and from the Mysteries as they had been shut out when the whole system was organized for defence against an inimical society around.
Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship.
Within four years of the beginning of his mission, before, in the nature of things, one single disciple could have been more than half-trained, the hierarchic aristrocracy had had this Teacher crucified.
First the representatives of the Emperor, the Empress and all the Imperial family; after these, in the hierarchic order, cunningly elaborated, and the least infraction of which might have been the cause of grave conflicts between the various departments of the State the members of the Privy Council, the Marshals, the Admirals, the High Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; then the Senate, the Legislative Assembly, the Council of State, the whole organization of the law and of the university, the costumes, the ermine, the headgear of which took you back to the days of old Paris an air of something stately and antiquated, out of date in our sceptical epoch of the workman's blouse and the dress-coat.
We see that the organic world presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, that of the plant world; and that the human world depends on the ministry of all three; and our whole conception of this world as "cosmos" is simply the filling in of this hierarchic framework. Yet this old structure falls to pieces under the new simplification.
"The Christian religion," he says, "is to my mind the most absurd and atrocious in its dogmas; the most unintelligible, the most metaphysical, the most intertwisted and obscure, and consequently the most subject to divisions, sects, schisms, heresies; the most mischievous for the public tranquillity, the most dangerous to sovereigns by its hierarchic order, its persecutions, its discipline; the most flat, the most dreary, the most Gothic, and the most gloomy in its ceremonies; the most puerile and unsociable in its morality, considered not in what is common to it with universal morality, but in what is peculiarly its own, and constitutes it evangelical, apostolical, and Christian morality, which is the most intolerant of all.
The footmen drew back their chairs so that they might sit down with the least inconvenience possible; and dinner at Berkeley Square reminded Ulick of some mysterious religious ceremony; he ate, overawed by the great butler there was something colossal, Egyptian, hierarchic about him, and Ulick could not understand how it was that Sir Owen was not more impressed. "Habit," he said to himself.
In him was no longing for vanished ages, no aspiring toward worlds lost in the night of time. His strong and solid temperament, dazzled with the luxuriance of life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from the artificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as well as from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity and misty, effeminate dreams of the old orient.
Science, I said, teaches hierarchic order that is, the rule of the few, of the select, the divinely appointed. But this hierarchy is an open order open to the select of every rank; a process of perpetual renewal will maintain the health of the political organism. The true polity is only in slow formation; for, obviously, human reason is not yet a complete development.
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