EDUCATION
intoxicating drugs. Christian moralists make the enormous
mistake of not insisting upon right means of livelihood.
The church allows people to believe that they can be good
Christians and yet draw dividends from armament factories,
can be good Christians and yet imperil the well-being of
their fellows by speculating in stocks and shares, can be
good Christians and yet be imperialists, yet participate in
war. All that is required of the good Christian is chastity
and a modicum of charity in immediate personal relations*
An intelligent understanding and appraisal of the long-range
consequences of acts is not insisted upon by Christian
moralists.1 One of the results of this doctrinal inadequacy
is that there is a singular lack, as well in imaginative as in
biographical literature, of intelligently virtuous, adultly
non-attached personages, upon whom young people may
model their behaviour. This is a deplorable state of things.
Literary example is a powerful instrument for the moulding
of character. But most of our literary examples, as we
have seen, are mere idealizations of the average sensual man.
Of the more heroic characters the majority are just
grandiosely paranoiac; the others are good, but good
incompletely and without intelligence; are virtuous within
a bad system which they fail to see the need of changing;
combine a measure of non-attachment in personal matters
with loyalty to some creed, such as Fascism or Communism
or Nationalism, that entails, if acted upon, the commission
of every kind of crime. There is a great need for literary
artists as the educators of a new type of human being.
Unfortunately most literary artists are human beings ^of
the old type. They have been educated in such a way
that, even when they are revolutionaries, they think in
terms of the values accepted by the essentially militaristic
1 In the Middle Ages the Church made a serious effort to moralize
economic activity. The attempt, as Tawney has shown in Religion
and the Rise of Capitalism, was abandoned after the Reformation.
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