n 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 gr