by Christ is quite
curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and
mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called
himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold
their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side
of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if
anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by
calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one
consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must
remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given;
Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may
blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that
does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some
supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity
belongs to the dark ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading
modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found
that Christianity, so far from belonging to the dark ages, was the one
path across the dark ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge
connecting two shining civilisations. If any one says that the faith
arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It
arose in the Mediterranean civilisation in the full summer of the Roman
Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain
as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is
perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more
extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering,
with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion
did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the
load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and
clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of
the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if
the civilisation ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged)
it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian
Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life
of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch
and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most
absurd thing that co