Religion

My Lords and Honored Readers, There is a sickness peculiar to our age, and it is the sickness of unbelief. Not the unbelief of the village atheist, who at least has taken a stand and planted a flag upon some hill, however barren, but the unbelief of the drifting man, the man without a creed, the man who hedges every conviction in cotton wool and refuses, on principle, to call any value the highest. Such a man may yet possess fortune, name, lineage, and a fine library. But he is hollow. He has built no temple within himself, and so the winds blow through him, and he is at the mercy of every passing fashion.

I write to insist, with all the thunder my pen can muster, that we all need religion. By religion I do not mean merely an inherited set of customs, nor a Sunday hat to be doffed at the proper intervals. I mean a thing held as the highest of values. I mean a doctrine that the heart can swear by, that the mind can defend, that the hand can enforce. Reason has its place, and a noble one. Let there be reason behind your creed, and let it be reason of the most rigorous order, for nothing dishonors faith so much as to be founded upon mere cowardice or sentiment. But reason alone is a cold instrument. It can dissect, but it cannot lift. It can demonstrate, but it cannot kneel. A man's religion must also be believed. He must be able to pour the whole of his heart into it, to hold it as his standard, to draw from it lines so rigid that no wind of fortune nor sweetness of temptation can bend them. He must hold a frame, as the swordsman holds his guard, unwavering, regardless of what feints and stratagems the world employs against him.

Without such a frame, the soul collapses inward. With it, the man stands.

You will ask me, then: what is your creed, sir, who urges so boldly that we must each have one? I shall tell you plainly, for I scorn to dress my faith in modesty's borrowed cloth.

My ultimate value is this: that it is my duty and my ecstasy to be the best. To be superior, and, what is harder, to prove it. To compete, and, what is hardest of all, to win. I do not shrink from competition. I do not pretend that competition is unseemly, or that the gentle man is too refined for it. I revel in competition. I rise toward it as the lark rises toward the morning. The day on which I am presented with a worthy rival is a day of festival. The hour in which I am tested is the hour in which I am most truly alive.

Let the meek philosophers of our drawing rooms instruct us that ambition is a disease. They lie, and they lie because they have already lost. The man who tells you that the desire to win is base is a man who has tasted defeat and found it inedible, and so he must declare the table itself uncouth. Pity him if you wish, but do not heed him.

Yet hear me well, for I am not preaching the savagery of the lone wolf. There is also, and indispensably, to be cooperation. Many of the greatest competitions, the ones that shape the destinies of houses and nations, require the cooperation of others. The general does not win his battle alone. The merchant does not build his fortune in a vacuum. The statesman does not rise upon the strength of his own voice. He must persuade. He must lead. He must inspire other men to lend him their hands, their swords, their voice, and their gold, and to do so willingly, even gladly. Therefore the man who would be best must also learn to cooperate well, to persuade with eloquence, to lead with weight. These are not the arts of the lesser man. They are the arts of the higher.

A word now upon a delicate matter, but one from which I shall not flinch. With women, I seek only cooperation, or, where cooperation is not on offer, a courteous neutrality. Never competition. It is a law as deep as any I know that women compete with women, and men with men, and that for men and women to contend against one another is a kind of blasphemy. It denies our nature. It mistakes the partner for the rival, and the rival for the partner, and from this confusion comes ruin in households and bitterness in nations. The lady is no enemy of the gentleman. She is the necessary other half of his enterprise, and he of hers. Let each contend within his proper field, and both fields shall flourish. Let the fields be confused, and weeds shall overtake them.

And now we come to the question that must always be asked of any man who speaks of religion. Who, or what, is God? Is there a God, or are there gods? Or is the heaven above us only an emptiness lit by indifferent stars?

I shall not pretend to a knowledge I do not possess. I do not know the gods as I would wish to know them. I have not sat at their table. But I tell you, upon my honor, that divinity exists. I have seen it. I have asked, and been answered. The unbeliever may scoff if he must, and I bear him no malice for his scoffing, for he speaks from the only soil he has tilled. But I have tilled another soil, and I have drawn from it a fruit he has not tasted.

What, then, is this god I have glimpsed? He is the apex. He is the chief competitor. He contends constantly, and constantly he wins. Does he ever lose? I cannot say. If he does, it cannot be by much, and it cannot be for long. In the end, whatever that end shall be, he will win. Else it shall not be the end. For he is immortal, and he is never quitting. He is the standard against which all rivalry is measured, and he is the silent presence at every duel. To know him, even partially, is to know what one is contending toward. He is not alone in divinity. The gods are many. Creators and builders of all that we see around us. 

Now mark this, for it is the doctrine that gathers all the rest into a single sheaf. Nature, by which I mean existence itself, is war. I do not mean by this the petty squabbles of the marketplace, nor the brawls of drunken sailors, but war in the highest sense: competition of a deadly serious nature, in which the stakes are existence and remembrance and the carrying forward of one's blood and one's name. The more you win, the more the world becomes a reflection of you. Your works endure. Your children prosper. Your being is remembered, and your seed is sown into the centuries to come, where it wins again, and again, in vessels you shall never see. The more you lose, the sooner you cease altogether to exist. Your impact upon the world is forgotten. Your name dissolves. You are reduced to nothing, as though you had never drawn breath at all.

In this sense, winning is conquering, for the world takes on your shape. Losing is being conquered, and being erased. There is no third path, my Lords. The pretense of one is a sedative for the dying.

Yet I must add the final and most subtle precept, without which all the rest curdles into vulgarity. It is a matter of grave importance to identify the right competition, and to compete within it with class. For a man may win every contest of pettiness and gain nothing but the crown of a fool. He may trample every weakling in his path and find that he has become, by the very trampling, a weakling himself. The contest debases the contestant who chooses it badly, or who fights within it without grace. Therefore choose your battles as carefully as you choose your faith, and conduct yourself within them as a gentleman conducts himself at the high table: with full appetite, with steady hand, with no apologies for hunger, but with manners that mark you as worthy of the feast.

Find the contest fit for a man of your rank. Enter it with reverence. Compete with all the fire of your heart and all the discipline of your mind. Cooperate where cooperation lifts you; cherish your women as the partners of your enterprise and not the rivals of it; and remember always that above you stands the immortal Apex, who is watching, and who is the standard by which the contest itself is judged.

Win, my Lords. Win nobly, and win much.

The ground of being is a battlefield, and the dust upon it is the dust of forgotten men. Do not lie down among them. Stand. Strike. Conquer. And in your conquering, become.