the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of
prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to
turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . A sentence
phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the
best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the
dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter
eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order
that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be
careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into
a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum,
and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as
orthodoxy. It was sanity; and to be sane is more dramatic than to be
mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The
Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet
it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one
idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so as
exactly to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge
bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make
Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid
an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox
Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the
orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to
have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been
easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the
bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is
easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head;
the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a
modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of
those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after
fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of
Christendom--that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple
to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one
at which one stands. To have fallen into an