nd emancipated; its despair is within.

And its despair is this, that it does not really believe
that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot
hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man
cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can
expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land
of authority. One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism;
but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through
a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has a story tied
to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house;
for it is my father's house. I end where I began--at the right end.
I have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy. I have come
into my second childhood.

But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has
one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole
matter I will attempt to express it. All the real argument about
religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside
down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of
Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane
or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge's
interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were:
"What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?"
I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions;
but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.
To the question, "What are you?" I could only answer, "God knows."
And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer
with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself."
This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have
never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves,
but even more natural to us than ourselves. And there is really
no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these
pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. It is only
since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation.
But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea
of joy.

It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity
of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure
sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean n