it."

As to that mess the Christian could be as pessimist as he liked, as
to the original design he must be optimist, for it was his work to
restore it. "St. George could still fight the dragon . . . if he were
as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world."

And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as
if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and
unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent
connection--the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this
hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of
loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world
without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian
theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God
was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike
of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world--it had evidently
been meant to go there--and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one
after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie
exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery
falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one
part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as
clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered
by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one
who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress.
And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and
turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back
to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind fancies of
boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on
the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when
I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour
than say that it must by necessity have been that colour: it might
verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy
thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant
the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters
of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatid