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 roses were red by some sort of choice:  it was the divine choice.  I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say 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 caryatides of the creed.  The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.  And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship—­ even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism.  And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket.  I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism.  But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world.  The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.  I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God.  But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity.  I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things.