I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my
mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did
come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me
a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in
some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went
out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me,
precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would
not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is
not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating,
exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found
out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was the object
of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture
as to why my parents kept a cat.

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 univ