long as it is the
worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are
not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan
that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural
Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature
in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he
is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes
at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow
at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did
Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to
something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object
of obedience; 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 c