The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are.  But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated.  Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational.  It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape.  I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society.  So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.  I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle.  But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.  The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood.  The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times.  The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption.  It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.  People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.  This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact.  For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.  A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue.  He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.  But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.  The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death.  The sun rises every morning.  I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.  Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.  His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.  The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.  A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.  But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.