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It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon the masses. Things being as they are, surely it is better that the Church should do the little she can than do nothing at all.
There are dreary places in "Also sprach Zarathustra," narrownesses and weaknesses too; they come whenever the writer is thinking of the evils of the hour, whenever he is gazing, not on the vision of his soul, but on the half-truths of the men about him. When I speak of Christ let no man think of Christianity. I speak of a prince of the soul, the boldest, the freest, the noblest of men that I know.
There is the same almost merciless realism which we find in "Helbeck" in dealing with certain trivialities and narrownesses of piety defects common to all whom circumstances confine to a little world, but more incongruous and conspicuous as contrasted with the dignity of Catholic ideals. Without conscious departure from truth, Mrs.
Beyond the religions of the present he sees always the essential religion which lasts when all local forms and marvels have passed away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as "prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;" misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man.
Ruskin adds: "Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance.... I was entirely conscious of his rectorial power, and affectionately submissive to it, so that he might have done anything with me, but for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable, political faiths."
Turgot, far as he was from many of the narrownesses of his time, yet did not entirely transcend this, the worst of them all.
A current in people's minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrownesses and mistakes of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and to guide the human race.
The continuance of the Church is a perpetual miracle, when you take into account the weakness, and the errors, and the follies, and the stupidities, and the narrownesses, and the sins, of the people who in any given day represent it.
And it is a good thing that we should not lose the local attachments that we have those narrownesses, those prejudices that give point to character. There is a kind of breadth that is shallowness; there is a kind of sympathy that has no punch.
Taking that great factor of life which men, with countless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, call Religion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in like manner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of tales is one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls and fates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry and Religion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reach their highest plane, merges them into identity.
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