And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world.  I look at the world and simply discover that they don’t.  Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air.  Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.  Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.  We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea.  So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.  But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice.  They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round.  I am left saying, “Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the countries of the Catholic Church.”  One explanation, at any rate, covers all three:  the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people now call “psychic.”  Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of Nature; and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting) Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man.  This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where Christ has His Church.  I know it will be said that Japan has become progressive.  But how can this be an answer when even in saying “Japan has become progressive,” we really only mean, “Japan has become European”?  But I wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark.  I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another.  These are the kind of thoughts which in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased.  First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag