hs my own position is utterly and even sadly simple.
I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that
one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are
no real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real
bank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to
those of us that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted,
even a false god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the
second place. When once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before
Him, offering flowers in spring as flames in winter. "My love is like a
red, red rose" does not mean that the poet is praising roses under the
allegory of a young lady. "My love is an arbutus" does not mean that the
author was a botanist so pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he
said he loved it. "Who art the moon and regent of my sky" does not mean
that Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon.
"Christ is the Sun of Easter" does not mean that the worshipper is
praising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothe
themselves with the spring or summer; but the body is more than raiment.
Religion takes almost disdainfully the dress of Nature; and indeed
Christianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with the
snow-drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields, I
know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring, for
spring alone, being always returning, would be always sad. There is
somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with flowers: and my
pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of the
dead.

THE REAL JOURNALIST

Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of
reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce
between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is
done. I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.
Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallel
columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its
responsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matter
of fact, goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more
hairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random
compromises, or barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, it
seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently