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 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
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 clock 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 that 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