s. 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 mor