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Updated: June 22, 2025
There never had been, never would be, a kingdom of God on earth, but only a few scattered individuals, each selfishly intent on the salvation of his own soul without organisation, without unity, without common purpose, without even a masonic sign whereby to know one another when they chanced to meet . . . except Shibboleths which the hypocrite could ape, and virtues which the heathen have performed . . . Would YOU have had me accept such a "Philosophy of History"?
His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down. No, no; a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities of the present.
To hear him talk was to feel a current of clarifying air blustering into a close club-room, where men bandy ineffectual platitudes, and mumble old shibboleths, and go away and do nothing. In our talk about policy and strategy we were Bismarcks and Rodneys, wielding nations and navies; and, indeed, I have no doubt that our fancy took extravagant flights sometimes.
All the shibboleths of a journalism which respected neither itself, its purpose, nor its readers echoed from every page. And this was the reflex of the work and thought of Errol Banneker, who intimately respected himself, and his profession as expressed in himself. There is much of the paradoxical in journalism as, indeed, in the life which it distortedly mirrors.
Thus isolated, he was like a solitary cuckoo contemplating the gyrations of a flock of rooks. Their motions seemed a little meaningless to one so far removed from all the fetishes and shibboleths of Westminster. He heard them discussing Miltoun's speech, the real significance of which apparently had only just been grasped.
Some of them were of that earnest type of self-righteousness which loves to smell out unrighteousness in their fellow countrymen, especially in those who are serving their country abroad; some were hypnotized by the old shibboleths of freedom, even when freedom merely stands for licence; some were retired Anglo-Indians, whose experience in the public service in India would have carried greater weight had not the peculiar acerbity of their language seemed to betray the bitterness of personal disappointment.
"Education, wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture, how easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature.
We're a lot of sublimated jackasses, sacrificing our country to ideals that are worn at elbow and down at heel. 'Other times, other customs. But we go calmly and stupidly onward, hugging our foolish shibboleths to our hearts, hiding behind them, refusing to do to-day that which we can put off until to-morrow. That is truly an Anglo-Saxon trait.
The democracy is a ready victim to shibboleths and catchwords, as all demagogues know too well. 'The abstract idea, as Schérer says, 'is the national aliment of popular rhetoric, the fatal form of thought which, for want of solid knowledge, operates in a vacuum. The politician has only to find a fascinating formula; facts and arguments are powerless against it.
If this were so, who shall say that the use or enjoyment of wit is not as right as it is natural? None, unless it be the narrowest of bigots, like those who objected to this heroic lady's mission of mercy to the East, because she did not echo their sectarian shibboleths, and would not ask whether a good nurse were Protestant or Romanist.
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