of loving the world without trusting it;
somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this
projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike,
the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world
separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into
the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--
and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two
parts of the two machines had come together, one after another,
all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude.
I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling
into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one
part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude,
as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was
answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor,
I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take
one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country
surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up,
as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind
fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain
to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane.
I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice:
it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would
almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must
by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been
any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a
condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole
doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of
notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides
of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void,
but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything
that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist;
to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to
be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--
even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for,
according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck,
the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the b