in the innocent.  And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable.  Christianity came in here as before.  It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another.  It divided the crime from the criminal.  The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven.  The crime we must not forgive at all.  It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness.  We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before.  There was room for wrath and love to run wild.  And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look.  Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty.  The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all.  He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry.  But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the “Odyssey.”  He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism.  But being outside patriotism he is outside “Henry V.”  Such a literary man is simply outside all literature:  he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.  For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out.  What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments.  It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city.  I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no means free of that building.  How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong?  This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.  Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman.  St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer.  Both passions were free because both were kept in their place.  The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle.  But he must not call the fight needless.  The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds.  But he must not call the fight hopeless.  So it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with