The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to / solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the / leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one / leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six / times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the / name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in / his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on / the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should / immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes / expressed, was 'an artist in life. ' Yet these vows are not more / extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar / periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures / in civic and national civilization -- by kings, judges, poets, and / priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great / chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical / folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a / patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that / these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any / saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary / and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like / a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very / high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions / which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get / there.

But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved / in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as / symbols of the 'decadence. ' But the men who did these things were not / decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is / generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men / essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious / direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not / hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments / of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad / promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same / monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which / it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. / And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, / unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly / sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, / if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.