But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship.  That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe.  It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.  The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck:  and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.  I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton’s Eden):  I hoarded the hills.  For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true.  This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:  for there cannot be another one.

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things.  These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine.  These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think:  that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now.  I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself.  It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.  But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard.  The thing is magic, true or false.  Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.  There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently.  Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons.  Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint:  we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.  We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us.  And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.  Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods:  he had saved them from a wreck.  All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it.  And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.

CHAPTER V.—­The Flag of the World

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist.  I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant.  The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as