He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.  A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.  He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.  No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so.  But Christianity has done more:  it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.  And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry:  the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere.  Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions.  Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration.  The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them.  In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air.  This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism—­the “resignation” of Matthew Arnold.  Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.  This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this.  On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass.  It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland.  Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.  Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.