Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle.  There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism.  It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable.  Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency.  Now, it was just at this point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide.  In that matter there had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity.  This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already found to be true.  This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right.  Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity.  Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology.  The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.  Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics.  But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology.  For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.  Now let me trace this notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little.  Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the [Greek:  meson] or balance of Aristotle.  They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever.  But the great truism of the [Greek:  meson] remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own.  But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept.  That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:  that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.