deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say
that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from
their point of view they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they
mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the
ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in
the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about
existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at
least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only
miserable about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.
I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace
about everything--they were at war about everything else. But if the
question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more
cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in
the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a
gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but
sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly)
it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more
manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the
superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and
fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the
soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the
uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the
apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this
primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be
expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to
one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the
agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This
is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to
be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies,
while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are
actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on
his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has
found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and
perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies
it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becom