 Chapter 4 The Ethics of Elfland Part 2 Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such it seemed was the joy of man, either in Elfland or on earth. The happiness depended on not doing something, which you could at any moment do, and which very often it was not obvious why you should not do. Now the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to the fairy, explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace. The other might fairly reply, well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace. If Cinderella says, how is it that I must leave the ball at twelve? Her godmother might answer, how is it that you are going there till twelve? If I leave a man in my will, ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth, and it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision. It might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees. For this reason, we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy, I could never join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the general sentiment of revolt. I should have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal in another chapter, but I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn. I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such futile fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I will give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon, and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem, seemed to me, read on fairy tales like Endymion's, a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot inter-eaten by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex. It is like a man plucking five pairs in mere absence of mind. The estates touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistle down made them weep. A burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men I felt might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cow slip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense for the cow slip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy and ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong. We can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible sense. I left the nurse, guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here. That when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this. That modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales rounded in me two convictions. First, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful. Second, that before this wildness and delight one might well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses, and the shock of the collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments which I have had ever since and which crude as they were have since hardened into convictions. First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism, saying that everything is as it must always have been being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now the fairy tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on this strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every color has in it a bold quality as of choice. The red of the garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened, and even about the date of that they were not very sure. The modern world, as I found it, was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them, I found that they really had no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things, except the fact that the things were repeated. Now the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd, but all the elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion and of an emotion that wants stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signaling to me with all its fingers at once. The crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea. All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption, a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead, a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary. If the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact, for the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them not by life, but by death, by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity but to my inaction. Now to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due not to lifelessness but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they especially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit, fierce, and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, do it again! And the grown-up person does it again, until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exalt in monotony. And perhaps God is strong enough to exalt in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun, and every evening, do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy. For we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence. It may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance. This was my first conviction, made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful. Now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense, that they were willful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic. Now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion, always present and subconscious, that this world of ours had some purpose, and if there is a purpose there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story, and if there is a story there is a storyteller. But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the very feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if anyone had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to overaw the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God. A somewhat formless image, what one might call an impressionist portrait, it is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, but man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer and his headlong imperialism would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality, and his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honorable of later scientific authors, notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have, in an exaggerated way, represented the earth as wicked, but Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin. But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison, the prison of one thought. These people seem to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on forever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting, anything for instance such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner and reading Gale that he would be glad to hear that the Gale now covered half the country. The water would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine. In fairyland there had been a real law, a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken, but the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken, for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared. One can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outlook which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally an empire. That is, it was vast, but it was not free. One went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective, but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air. Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance, but for me all good things come to a point, swords, for instance. So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue about it little, and I soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only they would say while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why then should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare with it. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, I like this vast cosmos with its throng of stars and its crowd of buried creatures, but if it comes to that why should not a man say I like this cozy little cosmos with its decent number of stars and as need a provision of livestock as I wish to see. One is as good as the other. They are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth. It is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world. Why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness? It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. The reason is that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military mustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call it tiny. If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people profess that the universe was one coherent thing. But they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so, and it never seemed to mine. Actually, and in truth, I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste. But I felt a sort of sacred thrift, for a economy as far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of half-pence. But I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling. These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the color and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure, but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic coziness by allusion to another book, always read in boyhood, Robinson Caruso, which I read about this time, in which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay even the wild romance of prudence. Caruso is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea. The best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Caruso might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise in empty or ugly hours of the day to look at anything, the coal scuttle or the bookcase, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breath escape. Everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure. As a hidden, untimely birth, he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius, and it was common to say that many a man was a great might have been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a great might not have been. But I really felt, the fancy may seem foolish, as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Caruso's ship, that there are two sexes and one son was like the fact that there were two guns and one ax. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost, but somehow it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planet seemed like things saved from the wreck, and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires, they are called so in Milton's Eden. I hoarded the hills, for the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural count to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price, for there cannot be another one. Thus ends in unavoidable inadequacy the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes toward life, the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write and felt before I could think, that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones first that world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation, it may be a conjuring trick with a natural explanation, but the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning and that meaning must have someone to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art, whatever it meant, it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint. We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed also in obedience to whatever made us. And last and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Caruso had saved his goods. He had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology. End of chapter four, part two. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by J. A. Carter. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter five, The Flag of the World, part one. When I was a boy, there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confessed that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said. For the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong, for that is meaningless. It is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and the pessimist thought everything bad except himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl. An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet. I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it, for there might perhaps be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and the choice of road. But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticizes this world as if he were house hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers, he might discuss whether the advantage of mid-summer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration. In the last chapter, it has been said that the primary feeling that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales. The reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that bellicose and even jingle literature which commonly comes next in the history of a boy. We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude toward life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism. It is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging house at Brighton which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family with the flag flying on the turret and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love. The point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot. Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing. Say, Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico, we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico. In that case, he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor certainly is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico, to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles. Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things, but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men love Pimlico as mothers love children arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honor to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her. The 18th century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time. Insofar as they meant that there is, at the back of all historic government, an idea of content and cooperation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong insofar as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I'll not hit you if you do not hit me. There is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, we must not hit each other in the holy place. They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine and found that they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The 10 commandments, which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands, a code of regimental orders issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity and only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men. If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instance that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated without undue bitterness by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature. I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back, his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly I think what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak, of course, of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses. That is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently. He is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested. He is the uncandid candid friend, the man who says, I'm sorry to say we are ruined and is not sorry at all. And he may be said without rhetoric to be a traitor, for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military advisor, he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way, the pessimist, who is the cosmic anti-patriot, uses the freedom that life allows to her counselors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that 1,200 men in Tottenham are down with smallpox, but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men. The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises. He is not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honor of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe. He will say, my cosmos, right or wrong, he will be less inclined to the reform of things, more inclined to a sort of front bench official answer to all attacks, soothing everyone with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this, which is true of a type of optimist, leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology which could not be explained without it. We say there must be a primal loyalty to life. The only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism, the whitewashing, the weak defense of everything, comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation. It is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me explain by once more using the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico, which seems unlikely, he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay at waste and turn it into the new Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform may be excessive. I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. Mere Gingo's self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst Gingos do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindus. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events, for it would be a nation even if the Hindus ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being England will not mind how she arose, but a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end, like Carlisle and Freeman, by maintaining that the Norman conquest was a Saxon conquest. He may end in utter unreason, because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870, but a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary, and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics. Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women, and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are in their personal intercourse with the man almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is. His wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pindinus's mother, who worshiped her son as a god, yet assumed that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticize. The fanatic can safely be a skeptic. Love is not blind, that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound, and the more it is bound, the less it is blind. This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life. Then he could be disinterested in his views of it. My son, give me thy heart. The heart must be fixed on the right thing. The moment we have a fixed heart, we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective. It is, I know, very common in this age. It was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold, which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer. Enough we live, and if a life, with large results so little rife, though bearable seem hardly worth, this pomp of worlds, this pain of birth. I know this feeling feels our epic, and I think it freezes our epic. For our titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment. We want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle to be stormed and yet as our own cottage to which we can return at evening. No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world, but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination I maintain it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself. I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they came, and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder oneself. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say the poor fellow of a man who had blown his brains out since he was an enviable person and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny in the slot machines by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin, it is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence, the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life, the man who kills a man kills a man, the man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world, his act is worse, symbolically considered, than any rape or dynamite outrage, for it destroys all buildings, it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds, but the suicide is not. That is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the celestial city. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them, but the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in a fury, for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act, there often are for rape and there almost always are for dynamite, but if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the crossroads and the stake driven through the body than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes, for it makes even crimes impossible. End of Chapter 5 Part 2 At the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker. He said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin, the other wants everything to end. In other words the martyr is noble exactly because, however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity, he confesses this ultimate link with life. He sets his heart outside himself. He dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being. He is a mere destroyer. Spiritually he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the crossroads and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide, for Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body. They smelt the grave a far off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist. This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude toward the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere and that the self-slayer and exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer and sadness, just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other. These two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life. He was so good that his dry bones could heal cities and pestilence. Another man flung away life. He was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right. But why was it so fierce? Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide. Had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? Had Christianity felt what I felt but could not and cannot express this need for a first loyalty to things and then for a ruinous reform of things? Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine. Christianity was accused at one and the same time of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still. An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable for half-past three but not suitable for half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose for the sake of argument we are concerned with the case of Thaumaturge healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer the point is not whether it was given in our time but whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question. It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any medieval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint or inwardness and sincerity. They will think me very narrow whatever that means if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk. Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark that Christianity, when stripped of its armor of dogma, as who would speak of a man stripped of his armor of bones, turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. Now if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the inner light, that would be an exaggeration, but it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the inner light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the inner light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone. It is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning just as our own aristocrats living the simple life get up early in the morning, because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games in the amphitheater or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment, the worst is what these people call the inner light. Of all horrible religions, the most horrible is the worship of the God within. Anyone who knows anybody knows how it would work. Anyone who knows anyone from the Higher Thought Center knows how it does work. Let Jones shall worship the God within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or the moon, anything rather than the inner light. Let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the God within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the inner light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun clears the moon, terrible as an army with banners. All the same it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and moon. If he does there is a tendency for him to imitate them, to say that because the sun burns insects alive he may burn insects alive. He thinks that because the sun gives people sunstroke he may give his neighbor measles. He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad he may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world. About the time when the stoic idealism had begun to show the weakness of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weakness of optimism. Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or in other words pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the God Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to natural religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall if he is still loving her it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the wise men of the stoics. Yet somehow at the dark end of the day he is bathing in hot bull's blood as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience. It must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are we end where the pagan nature worship ended. As the earth is kind we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad. On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old remnant of the stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given up the idea of any God in the universe and looked only to the God within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionize it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock them down. In this dilemma, same as ours, Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer which the world eventually accepted as the answer. It was the answer then and I think it is the answer now. This answer was like the slash of a sword. It sundered. It did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly it divided God from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity was really the only reason why anyone wanted to be a Christian. It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am here only concerned with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unruled like a carpet. All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is whether all terms are useless or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea about the origin of things. I think one can and so evidently does the evolutionist or he would not talk about evolution. The root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was a creator as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has thrown off. Even in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death. It was the prime philosophical principle of Christianity that this divorce and the divine act of making, such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the newborn child, was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most philosophers God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity in making it he said it free. God had written not so much a poem but rather a play, a play he had planned as perfect but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage managers who had since made a great mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading oneself to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world. St. George could still fight the dragon however big the monster bulked in the cosmos though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills, if he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world. St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things but only the original secret of their design. He can shake his sword at the dragon even if it is everything, even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its open jaws. And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines of different shapes and without apparent connection the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this whole in the world, the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it. Somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal and had made a world separate from himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the whole in the world. It had evidently been meant to go there, and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right all the other parts were repeating that rectitude as clock after dock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or to vary the metaphor I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress, and when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on the darkness became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice. It was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong color than say it must by necessity have been that color. It might barely have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said. It meant the whole doctrine of the fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal keratides of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cozy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist. To God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds. In my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Caruso's ship, even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise. For according to Christianity we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world. But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism, and the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had often called myself an optimist to avoid the two evident blasphemy of pessimism, but all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we all fit into the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit into the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learned that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything. The Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything and the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence, but I had heard that I was in the wrong place and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out in illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home. End of Chapter 5 Part 2 The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality, yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is. Its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden. Its wildness lies in weight. I give one course instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body. He would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men. He on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law. And then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other, and just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch, that is, the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet it is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point, but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes to the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides he should have a heart on both sides. But scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the North Pole because they are so fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organizing expeditions to find a man's heart, and when they try to find it they generally get on the wrong side of him. Now actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two legs he might deduce the two shoulder blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man's heart was in the right place then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical it has found so to speak an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong, if one may say so, exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth, but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands. It will not admit, though all the modernists wail to it, the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out. To show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth. I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course anything can be believed in any age, but oddly enough there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one. If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court I think one might call it a miracle. It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern world proves the truth that the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in nodding hill and battersy that I began to see that Christianity was true. This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without believing in it. When once one believes in a creed one is proud of its complexity as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all it is a compliment to say that it is elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident but a key and a lock are both complex and if a key fits a lock you know it is the right key. But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe the accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it and the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus if one asked an ordinary intelligent man on the spur of the moment, why do you prefer civilization to savagery? He would look round wildly at object after object and would only be able to answer vaguely why there is that bookcase and the coals and the coal scuttle and pianos and policemen. The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things, but that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible. There is therefore about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action and this hesitation chiefly arises oddly enough from an indifference about where one should begin. All roads lead to Rome, which is one reason why many people never get there. In the case of this defense of the Christian conviction I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing as another. I would begin it with a turnip or a taxi meter cab. But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear, it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of these mystical coincidences or rather ratifications. All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen, and I cannot understand any one passing the age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question. I did indeed retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the founder of Christianity, but I certainly regarded him as a man, though perhaps I thought that even at that point he had an advantage over some of his modern critics. I read the scientific and skeptical literature of my time, all of it at least that I could find written in English and lying about. I read nothing else. I mean, I read nothing else on any other note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls, which I also read, were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity, but I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaw who brought me back to Orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Payne and the Free Thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever, and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting for the first time whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures a dreadful thought broke across my mind. Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. I was in a desperate way. This odd effect of the great agnostics and arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and reread all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith from Huxley to Bradlaw, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind. The impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only, as I understood, had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its innervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them. There are fifty more. Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom, for I thought and still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise, and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul's Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me, in Chapter 1, to my complete satisfaction, that Christianity was too pessimistic. And then in Chapter 2 they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men by morbid tears and terrors from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence and put them in a pink and white nursery. One great agnostic asked why nature was not beautiful enough and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian optimism, that garment of make-believe woven by pious hands, hid from us the fact that nature was ugly and that it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool's paradise. This puzzled me. The charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not be at once the black mask on a white world and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another. It could not wear both green and rose-colored spectacles. I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy as did all young men of that time the taunts which swine-burn hurled at the dreariness of the creed. Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray with thy breath. But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism, as in Atlanta, I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained indeed in the abstract that life itself was pitch-dark, and yet somehow Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong, and it did for one wild moment cross my mind that perhaps those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other. It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accuser's fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wicketer than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices, but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another, but he would be in odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion. I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind. Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about what is called Christian, especially in its attitude toward resistance and fighting. The great skeptics of the 19th century were largely virile. Brad Law, in an expansive way, huxley in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison it did seem tenable that there was something weak and overpatient about Christian councils. The gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned upside down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity it seemed was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian because he never was angry, and now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history, because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valor of the crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity, somehow or other, both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coo de Leon did. The Quakers, we were told, were the only characteristic Christians, and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant. I take a third case, the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity, it may reasonably be said, is one thing combined to one kind of people. It began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn toward the doctrine often preached in ethical societies. I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity rounded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men, but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find confucius under eastern trees, and he would be writing, Thou shalt not steal. It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most permeable desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be, little boys should tell the truth. I believe this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still, with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting, as I supposed, that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped the light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church, from Plato to Emerson, were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity, that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic we were to remember that all men had one religion. When considering some mystic or spiritualist we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epocetus because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bousset because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years but not in two thousand. This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like, which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail, but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus certain skeptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family. It had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister away from their homes and their children. But then other skeptics slightly more advanced said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us, that it doomed women to the grudgery of their homes and children and forbade them loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or again certain phrases in the epistles or the marriage service were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for women's intellect. But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for women's intellect, for it was their great sneer at the church on the continent that only women went to it. Or again Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits, with its sackcloth and dried peas, for the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pulp and its ritualism, its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too colored. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaw the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breadth of prim respectability and of religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion. One thinks one thing and one another, and rebuked also for its union, is difference of opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs. In the same conversation a freethinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for despising Jews and then despised it himself for being Jewish. I wished to be quite fair then, and I wished to be quite fair now, and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers and also spin thrifts, but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic, but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, Quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too threadbare, austere yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique, for I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity, theoretically speaking, was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was indeed almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, he must have been anti-Christ. CHAPTER VI PART II And then, in a quiet hour, a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short. Some objected to his fatness. Some lamented his leanness. Some thought him too dark and some too fair. One explanation, as has been already admitted, would be that he might be in odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be very short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who were growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out. Old bow who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes, who have pale hair like toe, called him a dark man, while Negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps, in short, this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing, at least the normal thing, the center. Perhaps after all it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad, in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Beckett's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple, exactly where modern life is too complex. He found the church too gorgeous, exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees. The man who disliked vestiments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread and wine. I went over all the cases and I found the key fitted so far. The fact that swineburn was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained. It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in swineburn. The restraints of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity. Not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism. Nevertheless, it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise. I began more and more to think that it was wise. But it was not merely worldly wise. It was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other. Still the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency. Now it was just at this point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide. In that matter there had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity. This was just another contradiction, and this I had already found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which skeptics found the creed wrong, and in this I had found it right. Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I ever dreamed of Christianity. Then the most difficult and interesting part of the middle process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of Artheology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist, that we want not an amalgam or compromise but both things at the top of their energy, love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics, but I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once, and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this notion as I found it. All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium, that one may be mad and eat too much or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the Maison, or balance, of Aristotle. We seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning forever, but the great truism of the Maison remains for all thinking men and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which paganism tried to solve. That was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way. Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance. Christianity declared it was in a conflict, the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent, but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide, and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die. He that will lose his life the same shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes, it is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an alpine guide or a drillbook. This paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it. He must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher I fancy has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more. It has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry, the Christian courage which is a disdain of death, not the Christian courage which is a disdain of life. And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take for instance the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his desserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air, but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism. The resignation of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things. Neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full color. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets. You cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal. It does not, like a strict and searching humility, make a man as a little child who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels, for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus, it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them. It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before. In another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. Insofar as I am man, I am the chief of creatures. Insofar as I am a man, I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny, all that was to go. We were to hear no more of the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no preeminence over the beast, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had preeminence over all the brutes. Man was only sad because he was not a beast but a broken God. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth as if clinging to it. Now man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns, raid like the sun, and fans of peacock plumage. And at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission in the gray ashes of Saint Dominic and the white snows of Saint Bernard. When one came to think of oneself there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist, let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of the being, let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool, though that is Calvinistic, but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. Here again in short Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious. The church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of oneself. One can hardly think too much of one's soul. Take another case. The complicated question of charity was some highly uncharitable idealist seemed to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly charity means one of two things, pardoning unpardonable acts or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves, as we did in the case of pride, what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive and some one couldn't. A slave who stole wine could be laughed at. A slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed and cursed even after he was killed. Insofar as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational and even refreshing, but it is a delusion. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent, and it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild, and the more I considered Christianity the more I found that while it had established a rule and order the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild. Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Only they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry, but in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the odyssey. He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism, but being outside patriotism he is outside Henry V. Such a literary man is simply outside all literature. He is more of a prisoner than any bigot, for if there is a wall between you and the world it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments, we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them as a man is free from a prison and being free of them as a man is free of a city. I am free from Windsor Castle, that is, I am not forcibly detained there, but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism as pure poetry could be loosened like cataracts. St. Francis, in praising all good, could be more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman, St. Jerome in denouncing all evil could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets and the purple banners going into battle, but he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds, but he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was, with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but what was more allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Christianity rose into a high and strange coup d'etatre of morality, things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from the monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the plantagents, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who in the official shambles kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics was entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves, but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform, but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any imminent philanthropist, go into reading Gale and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quick line. Our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of millionaires, but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller or any modern tyrant publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey. Thus the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the faith. It is true that the historic church has at once emphasized celibacy and emphasized the family. As at once, if one may put it so, been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side, like two strong colors, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colors which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray. In fact, the whole theory of the church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a color, not merely the absence of a color. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colors co-existent but pure. It is not a mixture like russet or purple. It is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles and is in the pattern of the cross. So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It is true that the church told some men to fight and others not to fight, and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means that the church preferred to use its supermen and to use its Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the life of battle for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All that the church did so far as that goes was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, gradually became monks. The Quakers became a club instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says. They poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run the whole world, and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to run it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James Douglas, or the banner of Joan of the Maid. And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture. The paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and in the soul of St. Louis the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb, the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is, can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the church attempted. That is the miracle she achieved. This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life. This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy. Anyone might discover mercy. In fact, everyone did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe, that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature, for no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Anyone may say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy, but to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy. That was a discovery in psychology. Anyone might say either swagger nor grovel, and it would have been a limit. But to say here you can swagger, and there you can grovel, that was an emancipation. This was the big fact about Christian ethics. The discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble upright because proportioned with symmetry. He was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support. Every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. It wore a hair shirt under his golden crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination, for Beckett got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson in gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire who has the black and drab outwardly for others and the gold next to his heart. But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Beckett's. The balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the northern snows, others could be flung at his festival in the southern cities. And because fanatics drink water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the pagan empire, just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If anyone wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that under Christianity, Europe, while remaining a unity, has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the pagan empire would have said, You shall all be Roman citizens and grow alike, let the German grow less slow and reverent, the Frenchman less experimental and swift. But the instinct of Christian Europe says, let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. You will make an equipoise out of these excesses, the absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France. Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch, but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The church could not afford to swerve a hare's breath on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas. The lion tamer, the idea of birth through a holy spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which anyone can see need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst its chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalizations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances, might wither all the Christmas trees, or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. This is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity, and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The church, in its early days, went fierce and fast with any warhorse, yet it is early unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left, on one hand, the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The Orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions. The Orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman. It is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head. The difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist. It is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom, that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall. There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame, but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure, and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. End of chapter 6 part 2.