a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent
pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday;
joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, 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