actical kings had lost.

Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the
riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in
which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not
one of another age but of another world.

Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the
Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the
philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their
names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were
those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their
thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had
their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must
understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was
the completion of the incomplete."*

[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 211.]

G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he
too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of
his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a
hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the
history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness
of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But
at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole
race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty
power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.

It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart
of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from
within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart
that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would
call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose
strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass.
It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made
eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in
some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the
broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended
unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the
mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only
the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more
human than humanity.

[* Ibid., p. 223.]

It seems t