it must be enjoyed,
not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously.
If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended.
Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties.
Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.
Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination.
The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything
that was bad.

On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented
by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends
had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked
only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature,
and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough
interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it.
They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the
ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only
people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up;
and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock
them down. In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly
stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually
accepted as THE answer. It was the answer then, and I think it is
the answer now.

This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered;
it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided
God from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the
deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity,
was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian.
It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist
and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am here only concerned
with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this
great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating
or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they
must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God
in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has,
in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet.
All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge.
The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things.
I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would
not talk about evolution. And the root phras