This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion.  And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.  The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals.  It was not a matter of degree.  It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it.  The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.  The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other:  these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell.  One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence.  Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren’s.  I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?

Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track.  Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide:  had it perhaps felt it for the same reason?  Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express—­this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things?  Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine.  Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world.  The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four.  What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.  If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age.  If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing.  A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century.  But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century.  It is simply a matter of a man’s theory of things.  Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question.  And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.