odoxy.
It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was
the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop
this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of
statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days
went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to
say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.
She swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous
obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by
all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next
instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made
it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or
accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It
would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall
into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it
is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head;
the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a
modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those
open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and
sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom--that would
indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an
infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To
have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian
Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided
them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly
chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling
and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

CHAPTER VII.--_The Eternal Revolution_

The following propositions have been urged: First, that some faith in
our life is required even to improve it; second, that some
dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order to be
satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content and necessary
discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the
Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the gigantic levity of pleasure
nor the superb intolerance of pain. There is a vital objection to the
advice merely to grin and bear it. The objection