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 cross-roads 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 mi