A moment’s digression; in fact, the main point. What is the most precise and most atrocious charge that is made against him? That he sacrificed, in the course of alchemical and magical experiments, a matter of 800 children? I submit that, a priori, this sounds a little improbable. Gilles de Rais was the lord of a district whose population would not have been very extensive, and even in that age of slavery, dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and ignorance, which seems to Mr. G. K. Chesterton the one ideal state of society, it must have been a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders on such wholsale principles. Whenever questions arise with regard to black magic or black masses, invocations of the devil, etc., etc., it must never be forgotten that these practices are strictly functions of Christianity. Where ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there and there only Christianity takes hold. But under the great systems of the civilised parts of the world, there is no trace of any such perversion in religious feeling. It is only the bloodthirsty and futile Jehovah who has achieved such monstrous births. Such upas-trees can only grow in the poisonous mire of fear and shame where thought has putrefied to Christianity. There is thus no antecedent improbability that Gilles de Rais (or any other person of that place and period) was addicted to black magical practices, for they were all Catholics. The power of the Church was, at that time, absolute, and even research was limited by the arbitrary theology imposed upon the mind of everyone. The abomination was at its height. But its decline has been rapid. True, one hundred years later it was still possible for Queens to be bulldozed by Presbyterian pulpiteers, but the time was already predictable when their best was for undergraduates to be bluffed by homosexual ecclesiastics. I suppose it is ll in the family. While these profound thoughts were producing a hypochondriac obnubilation of my mental faculties, it suddently occured to me that after all, I had heard this story before. And I saw the connection. In the pitch-dark ages, when Christianity held unchallenged sway over those portions of this globe which it had sufficiently corrupted, the pursuit of knowledge—knowledge of any kind—was justly estimated by the people in power as the one and only dangerous pursuit. Even so, as late as 300 years ago, it was not considered very gentlemanly to be able to read and write. I am not sure that it is. In any case, it is a great error in education to teach these things. Grammar, we must never forget, appears in the word "Gramarye," beloved of Sir Walter Scott, and "grimoire," a black magical ritual—that is   7000  to say, any written document. Precious little knowledge filtered through Christianity. It was against the interests of the Church, and in those times it was much easier to suppress people and ideas than it is now, though even today we find priests—at least in Oxford—who appear not to have heard of a certain recent invention by a notorious Magician inspired by the Devil—the Printing Press. But they feared. So those who pursued knowledge were at the best under strong suspicion of heresy. I need not quote the obvious names. But there were certain bodies of people who did carry on the old knowledge, mostly by oral tradition, and who were perforce tolerated to a certain extent, because even the little knowledge that they did possess was so exceedingly useful. The best way to make armour, or to build Cathedrals, or to heal sickness would enable the Christian to get ahead of his friends. Therefore, although conscience evidently demanded the maximum amount of persecution compatible with the existence of villains, the Jews and the Arabs were at least allowed to live. Besides, the Arabs saw to the themselves. But no one was better aware than the Pope that knowledge was power. For all he know, and he probably knew that he did no know much, the Jews and the Arabs might get together and overturn the whole construction of society. Had he not in his own records the very best example of such a catastroĸhe? There is a large number of excellent people, possessed of even less that the minimum amount of brains required to grease a gimlet, who are always boring us with the bogey of the Jew-Bolshevist peril. But as most of them are Roman Catholic and unaware that Rome is laughing in its sleeve at them, they conveniently ignore what should be—if they realised it—their best argument. What was the ultimate cause of the destruction of the great civilisation of Rome? What corrupted the spirit of a people unconquerable in arms? What but the spread of the slave morality of Jewish communists of the period? If you will take your New Testaments from your pockets, you will find in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the thirty-second verse: "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and not one of them said that aught of the things that he possessed was his own, but that they had all things in common." Of course one of them, and he too was a Jew, tried to hold out on the kitty, and was struck miraculously dead for his pains. Lenin and Trotsky never did as well! So, as Roman Catholics are always telling us, the Church has a monopoly of logic, and The Pope argued that all Jews were communists. Anyone who had or wanted knowledge must be a Jew, and therefore a communists, and therefore—well, the Pope too believed in preparedness, though he probably called it a programme of disarmament. When people scrap battleships in the name of peach on earth and goodwill to men, it means that they have found battleships useless and too expensive, and that they have found something cheaper and more deadly. So the Curia kept a weapon in reserve, in order to be sure of having a nice jolly pogrom whenever they gave the word. And what was the word to be? Nice quiet peasant folk, or genial hard-working hunters and fighters, are not easy to arouse to indiscriminate slaughter without reason. In order to get them going, there are only two things which you can play on—greed and fear. The motive behind the Crusades was the story of the fabulous wealth of the East. We find, in fact, that well-organised armies of buccaneers, such as the Templars, did not bring back incalculable spoils, while the honest pious mugs ruined themselves in the process. Now, in this particular sport of suppressing earnest enquirers, it was not much good trying to play on people’s greed. For everyone knew that even if the Jews had wealth, they managed to hide it very successfully, and that they had a nasty was of arranging for protection with peoĸle who were too powerful to be bullied, and too good business men to be fooled into killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. So the only motive available was fear, and in those ages where ignorance was fostered with infinite devotion, it was even easier to create a scare about bogies than our propaganda in the recent scrap found it. I was in Venice just before the war, when Halley’s comet was around, and although the Pope himself sprinkled holy water over the comet, and sent it his special benediction and told the people it would do no harm, in his most ex cathedra manner, the Venetians gathered themselves in panic-stricken crowds in the Square of St. Mark and waited, howling, for the end of the world. It was accordingly easy enough to associate the pursuit of knowledge with the most abominable crimes, real or imaginary or both. For this reason, we hear—not as a demonstrated thesis, but as a commonplace of inherited knowledge—that Jews were sorcerers and wizards. In other works, they know something about grammar. We heard that they transformed themselves into cats or bats, and sucked pe&127;ple’s big toes. I have never, personally, investigated the question as to whether this form of nutrition is palatable. But, alas! even in those idyllic Chestertonian times there was a little shrewd common sense knocking about; the instinct—sometimes very splendidly described as horse sense—which comes from intimate wordless unintellectual communing with Nature (please do not take that word "communing" in any bad sense; if it were not for Baldwin, I would be a Conservative myself)--the instinct of some people, who at the bottom of their hearts, did not so much believe in these phantasms. I was not so easy to get them to go out and murder a lot of inoffensive people at the word jump. They had to be supplied with something a little more tangible. You will notice how all this fort of argument is invariably of the ad captandum variety. It is produced out of nowhere for a definite purpose; and, as the French say, does not rime with anything. If it did, of course, it would immediately be exposed as nonsense. It is satisfied that nobody can disprove it any more than they can prove it. Take a concrete example. A nice young gentleman the other day wanted (very properly) to earn his living, and not being peculiarly endowed by Nature in the matter of original invention, he thought he might make a story out of the idea of a Suicide Club. In this he was evidently correct. Robert Louis Stevenson had in fact proved the point. So he took Stevenson’s story and transferred it to Germany, and drivelled on about the ace of spades, and quoted statistics of suicides, and said that I was the president of the Club and that the Berlin police were after me. Now, I am afraid it would be a little bit difficult for anyone to prove that I am responsible for any suicides that may take place in Germany. But, on the other hand, it is quite impossible for me to disprove it. So now, if you want to attack anybody without the slightest fear of contradiction, you know how to set to work. .