It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and
unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hold in
the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being
worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had
made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hold in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there—and then the
strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted
and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief.
Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was
answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And
when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields
of my childhood. All those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly
transparent and sane. I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I
would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been any other.
My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall.
Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.
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