It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything.  It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe.  An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all.  The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe.  A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn’t.  Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable.  It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.  From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.  It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides.  Yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat country.  Scientific men are also still organising expeditions to find a man’s heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises.  If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain.  But if he guessed that the man’s heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician.  Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity.  Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.  It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong.  Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected.  It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.  It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts.  It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age.  Of course, anything can be believed in any age.  But, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.  If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia.  For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.  If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident.  But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I