at.

So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not merely as a
chance example, I have found Europe and the world once more like the
little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; I
look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or
that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but
I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and
flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is
also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his
existence. I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any
instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which
has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not
at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only
a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human
nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved
Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest
of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a
woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world
(even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous
idolatry of sexual innocence--the great modern worship of children. For
any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt
by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with
the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the
church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is
universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to
be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates,
I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human
experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is
one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the
sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion
and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I
do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth,
but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies
say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has
again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is
true. Alo