So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition. There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children.
To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ.
It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone as of a random and illiterate heckling. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. The other is to walk 'round the whole world till we come back to the same place and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. There are two ways of getting home and one of them is to stay there. Introduction: The Plan Of This Book Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. 4.2 Appendix II: On Authority and Accuracy. 3.3 III: The Strangest Story in the World. 
2.7 VII: The War of the Gods and Demons. 2.6 VI: The Demons and the Philosophers.
0 kommentar(er)
