"I think I was in some danger of going wrong at the time I am talking about. I was altogether too impatient of surfaces. Heaven forbid the notion that I was ever in danger of being in any sense of the word a Protestant; but perhaps I was rather inclined to the fundamental heresy on which Protestantism builds its objection to what is called Ritual. I suppose this heresy is really Manichee; it is a charge of corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed to be not 'very good,' but 'very bad'--or, at all events, too bad to be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth. It is extraordinary by the way, that the thinking Protestant does not perceive that this principle damns all creeds and all Bibles and all teaching quite as effectually as it damns candles and chasubles--unless, indeed, the Protestant thinks that the logical understanding is a competent vehicle of Eternal Truth, and that God can be properly and adequately defined and explained in human speech. If he thinks _that_, he is an ass. Incense, vestments, candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites--all these things are miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls, misapprehensions, errors which are inseparable from speech of men used as an expression of the Church. In a savage dance there may be a vast deal more of the truth than in many of the hymns in our hymn-books.
"After all, as Martinez said, we must even be content with what we have, whether it be censers or syllogisms, or both. The way of the censer is certainly the safer, as I have said; I suppose because the ruin of the external universe is not nearly so deep nor so virulent as the ruin of men. A flower, a piece of gold, no doubt approach their archetypes--what they were meant to be--much more nearly than man does; hence their appeal is purer than the speech or the reasoning of men.
"But in those days at Lupton my head was full of certain sentences which I had lit upon somewhere or other--I believe they must have been translations from some Eastern book. I knew about a dozen of these maxims; all I can remember now are:
"_If you desire to be inebriated: abstain from wine._" "_If you desire beauty: look not on beautiful things._" "_If you desire to see: let your eyes be blindfolded._" "_If you desire love: refrain from the Beloved._"