f 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 Galilaean, 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
Galilaean 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 foo