or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea about the origin of things.  I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about evolution.  And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.  A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has “thrown off.”  Even in giving it forth he has flung it away.  This principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out.  A woman loses a child even in having a child.  All creation is separation.  Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.  According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.  According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.  God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.  I will discuss the truth of this theorem later.  Here I have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter.  In this way at least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one’s self to be either a pessimist or an optimist.  On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence.  One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world.  St. George could still fight the dragon, however big the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills.  If he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world.  St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design.  He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything; even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its open jaws.

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