Life is like that, and we cannot alter it. Quarrel with the
seemingly arbitrary or unreasonable condition, and the whole fairy
palace vanishes. "Life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as
brittle as the window-pane."
From all this it is but a step to the consideration of dogma and the
orthodox Christian creed. Mr. Chesterton is at war to the knife with
vague modernism in all its forms. The eternal verities which produce
great convictions are incomparably the most important things for human
nature. No "inner light" will serve man's turn, but some outer light,
and that only and always. "Christianity came into the world, firstly in
order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a
divine company and a divine captain." This again is human nature. No man
can live his life out fully without being mastered by convictions that
he cannot challenge, and for whose origin he is not responsible. The
most essentially human thing is the sense that these, the supreme
conditions of life, are not of man's own arranging, but have been and
are imposed upon him.
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