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Among people of thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic foreboding and a kind of shame a foreboding that secret forces were at work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies who desired to live in peace, and a shame that civilization itself, all the ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of modern Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities of war, with its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings and disembowellings "heroic charges" as they are called by the journalists and its gospel of hatred.
We have heard of laymen, too, taken to Rome by force, or decoyed thither under false pretences there to be punished by the universal Inquisition; and whatever of incredibility may appear in some tales of Inquisitorial abduction, the general fact that such abductions have taken place, seems to be incontrovertible.
Are the ruins and impostures and miseries and superstitions which beset the traveller abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step in his own hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effective shapes of ignorance and want and incredibility, that we must forever seek an alien contrast to our native intelligence and comfort?
I should not believe such a story were it told me by Cato, was a proverbial saying in Rome, even during the lifetime of that philosophical patriot. The incredibility of a fact, it was allowed, might invalidate so great an authority. Plutarch, in vita Catonis.
In them was exemplified that confusion of the intellectual being which is produced by the witness of incontestable truth to a thing incredible in which case the probability always is, that the incredibility results from something in the mind of the hearer falsely associated with and disturbing the true perception of the thing to which witness is borne.
One passes the door, closes it behind one, steps into the outer world, looks back, and there is only before one's view a thick cold wall the windows are dead, there is no sound, only bland, dull, expressionless space. Moreover this dull wall, almost instantly, persuades one of the incredibility of what one has seen.
Why, if our priests are to be believed, those of them, even the very worst, who have money enough to pay for masses and indulgences, may buy themselves off from purgatory, and shine in glory with the best." "Does not that carry incredibility and absurdity on the very face of it?" "It seems very hard on the poor man who can't buy himself off," said La Croissette.
But the Christian story of what they call God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it for that is the plain language of the story cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it.
A play which imitated only the common occurrences of the world, would, upon the admirers of Palmerin and Guy of Warwick, have made little impression; he that wrote for such an audience was under the necessity of looking round for strange events and fabulous transactions, and that incredibility, by which maturer knowledge is offended, was the chief recommendation of writings, to unskilful curiosity.
In that case their improbability would be at the highest, but would not even then amount to incredibility.
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