Siegfried as Protestant - Page 2

Church. This was called Protestantism;
and though the Protestants were not strong enough for their
creed, and soon set up a Church of their own, yet the movement,
on the whole, has justified the direction it took. Nowadays the
supernatural element in Protestantism has perished; and if every
man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)
Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become
Anarchism. Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one
of the notable new creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.

The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory
is its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There
is no such thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with
is a multitude of men, some of them great rascals, some of them
greet statesmen, others both, with a vast majority capable of
managing their personal affairs, but not of comprehending social
organization, or grappling with the problems created by their
association in enormous numbers. If "Man" means this majority,
then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on the contrary,
resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants; must be
governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be
secured by deliberately filling them with prejudices and
practicing on their imaginations by pageantry and artificial
eminences and dignities. The government is of course established
by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism
once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on
unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable
people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind
the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to
maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they
privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the
deepest veneration for creeds and ideals which they ridicule
among themselves with cynical scepticism. No individual Siegfried
can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy; in fact, the
individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself
confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this
dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our
governors, and they see that their business is not the devising
of laws and institutions to prop up