kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit
fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.
They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it
again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong
enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough
to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning,
"Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be
a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg.
If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead
of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not
be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose.
It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they
admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at
any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation
after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last
appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish
emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely
felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful:
now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they
were WILFUL. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises
of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world
involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.
And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious;
that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose,
there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story:
and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition.
It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions.
The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.