grass and flowers.  A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence.  I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity.  But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres.  The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world.  Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence—­ the great modern worship of children.  For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.  With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal.  It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate.  But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music.  The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach.  Celibacy is one flower in my father’s garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name.  But I may be told it any day.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion.  I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.  All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true.  Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden.  Theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste.  For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar.  But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.  Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.  Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise