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 confess 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 that 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 of 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

criticises 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 midsummer 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 jingo

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 towards 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 loved 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 a 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 honour 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 eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in

so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they

were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far 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 will 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 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 Ten 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 instant 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 am 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 adviser 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 counsellors 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 twelve hundred 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 has 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 honour 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 every one

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 defence 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 using once

more 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 it 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 jingo

self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst

jingoes 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 Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for

it would be a nation even if the Hindoos 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 English 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 Carlyle 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 Pendennis'

mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his

virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic.

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 fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. 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 one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "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 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 cross-roads 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.

About 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

cross-roads, 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 afar 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 to 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 in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in 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 in 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 to half-past three, but

not suitable to 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 a case of thaumaturgic 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 mediaeval

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 armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour 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 of the

amphitheatre 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. Any one who knows any body knows how it would

work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall

worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the

sun or 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, clear as 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 sun-stroke, he may give his neighbour 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 weaknesses of

pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses 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 loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn

in clear water as did the Wise Man 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. Because 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 revolutionise 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 (the

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 any one 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 unrolled 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. And 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 philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs

the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born 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 set 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 one's self 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 hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of

loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the word 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 hole 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

colour than say it must by necessity have been that colour: it might verily 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 caryatides of the creed. The fancy that the

cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, 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. And

my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the

goods from Crusoe'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 too 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 fit in to the world. The Christian

optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to 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 learnt 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 in 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 and 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.