e for all Christian
theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it
as a little thing he has "thrown off." Even in giving it forth he
has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation
is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the
evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman
loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that
this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet
from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.
According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.
God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he
had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human
actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
I will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have only
to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma
we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at least one could
be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self to be either
a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all
the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence.
One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with
the world. St. George could still fight the dragon, however big
the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the
mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. If he were as
big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world.
St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in
the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design.
He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything;
even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its
open jaws.

And then followed an experience impossible to describe.
It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two
huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without
apparent connection--the world and the Christian tradition.
I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must
somehow find a way