Page:Chesterton - Heretics, 1905.djvu/33

brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is the great difference between some recent developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say, the morality of the "Divine Comedy" with the morality of Ibsen's Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the "Inferno" of an early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments—