t, 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 ecstasies, 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 becomes
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 es