moment.
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to
be useful. Now the old pagan world went perfectly straightforward until
it discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake. It was
nobly and beautifully reasonable, and discovered in its death-pang this
lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that
reasonableness will not do. The pagan age was truly an Eden or golden
age, in this essential sense, that it is not to be recovered. And it is
not to be recovered in this sense again that, while we are certainly
jollier than the pagans, and much more right than the pagans, there is
not one of us who can, by the utmost stretch of energy, be so sensible
as the pagans. That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be
recovered by any man after Christianity; and for this excellent reason,
that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading. Let me
take an example, the first that occurs to the mind, of this impossible
plainness in the pagan point of view. The greatest tribute to
Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's "Ulysses." The poet
reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire
to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He
desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable
qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is
all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a
Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that
is a Christian product. Everything in that old world would appear to
have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad man was
a bad man. For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a
reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this
reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the
novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a
pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape
unpleasant. Hence they had no idea of romance; for romance consists in
thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous; it is a
Christian idea. In a word, we cannot reconstruct or even imagine the
beautiful and astonishing pagan world. It was a world in which common
sense was really common.

My general meaning touching the three virtues of which I have spoken
will now, I hope, be sufficiently clear. They are all three
paradoxical, they are all three practical,