highly beneficial to our health.  It is only afterwards that we realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance.  The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness.  The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people.  The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.  But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

And its despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots.  A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy.  But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority.  One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism; but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design.  Here everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father’s house; for it is my father’s house.  I end where I began—­at the right end.  I have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy.  I have come into my second childhood.

But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter I will attempt to express it.  All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up.  The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.  That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.  In Sir Oliver Lodge’s interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were:  “What are you?” and “What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?” I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.  To the question, “What are you?” I could only answer, “God knows.”  And to the question, “What is meant by the Fall?” I could answer with complete sincerity, “That whatever I am, I am not myself.”  This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves.  And there is really no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door.  It is only since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation.  But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy.