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 wait. I give one coarse 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 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 till 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. Yet 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 ears, 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 of the creed more perfectly

than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill and Battersea 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's 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 this

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 wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why,

there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in 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 defence 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 taximeter 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 in that point, He had an advantage

over some of His modern critics. I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time -- all of it, at least, that I

could find written in English and lying about; and 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 Bradlaugh 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

Paine 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 the 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 in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways.

I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to

Bradlaugh, 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 enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will

give such instances 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 I. (to my complete satisfaction)

that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II., 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, "the 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 at once be 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-coloured spectacles. I

rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne 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 "Atalanta"), 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 accusers fools. I simply

deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder 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 an 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 all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards

resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive

way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something

weak and over patient about Christian counsels. 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 up-side 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 to 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 valour 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 Coeur 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 confined 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 towards 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 primeval desert, and the

meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed 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

this 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 Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, 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

sceptics 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 sceptics

(slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that

it doomed women to the drudgery 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 woman's intellect. But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a

contempt for woman'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. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of

porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity

had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it

restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breath 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, "It is difference of opinion that prevents the world from

going to the dogs." In the same conversation a free-thinker, 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 wish 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 spendthrifts; 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 thread-bare, 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 of 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 Antichrist.

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 an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.

Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are

growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he

expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) 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 centre. 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 Becket'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 entrées. The man who disliked vestments 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 entrées, not in the bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far. The fact that Swinburne 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 Swinburne. 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 such

another contradiction; and this I had already found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which

sceptics 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 dreamed of Christianity.

Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly

through all the enormous thoughts of our theology. 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 u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant

to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great

truism of the u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] 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 drill book. 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 Chinese

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 deserts 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 colour. 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. In so far as I am Man I am the

chief of creatures. In so far 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

the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, 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

pre-eminence 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 rayed like the sun

and fans of peacock plumage. Yet 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 St. Dominic and the white snows

of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one's self, 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 his 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 one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think

quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly 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. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even

refreshing; but it is a dilution. 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. Really 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 a 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. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de théatre 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 that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the

Plantagenets, 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 has 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 eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the

quicklime. 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 emphasised celibacy and emphasised

the family; has 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 colours, 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 colours 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 colour: not

merely the absence of a colour. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in

most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent 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, simply 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 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; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one 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. Any one might 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. Any one might say, "Neither 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. Christianity 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. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is

much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got

the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the

black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man's

body as in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man

prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because

fanatics drank 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 any one 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 Frenchmen 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. We 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 hair's breadth 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; she was a lion tamer. The idea of

birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of

prophecies, are ideas which, any one 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 his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations 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 to 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 utterly

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; as 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.

Next Chapter

This document (last modified September 23, 1995) from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library server, at

Wheaton College