es something gigantic
and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf
because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless
silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is
a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick room.
We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because
the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken
farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the
tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber
of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to
hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret
of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the
strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again
haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the
Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the
thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,
almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing
their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His
open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city.
Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists
are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He
flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how
they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained
something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering
personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something
that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was
something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous
isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show
us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it
was His mirth.

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