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In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
"Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do with them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed?"
these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?" "No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."
"Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?
Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about their punishment.
"Odd, isn't it," he said, "that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.
"Well, my dear," said the young man, cheerfully, "if he were Satan himself, he is done for now you have told somebody. One goes mad all alone, old girl.
It is awful, I think I must be mad." "If you really were mad," said the young man, "you would think you must be sane.
If you'll take my advice, Mr. Smythe, you'll put this at once in the hands of some energetic inquiry man, private rather than public.
"Go on," said the priest very gently. "We are only trying to find the truth. What are you afraid of?" "I am afraid of finding it," said Flambeau.
black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It's like the dream of an atheist.
"Sleep!" cried Father Brown. "Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that can fall on them." Craven's parted lips came together to say, "What do you mean?" The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: "We have found the truth; and the truth makes no sense."
The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of interest. "Did you ever study medicine?" he asked. "You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."
You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you."
"You call it queer, and I call it queer," said the other, "and yet we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through nature or human wills.
As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the crooked track of a man."
He had a sort of half purpose, which he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it.
"Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."
"I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry," answered Father Brown. "The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."
This young man with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner than a puritan—a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the earth; a man of the stone age—a man of stone.
He seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine.
The cobbler was, as in many villages, an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary than Mad Joe's. It was a morning of theological enigmas.
"Don't say anything! Oh, don't say anything," cried the atheist cobbler, dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the English legal system. For no man is such a legalist as the good Secularist. The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a fanatic. "It's well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the world's law favours you," he said; "but God guards His own in His pocket, as you shall see this day."
The blacksmith is mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no miracle, doctor, except in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and yet half-heroic heart.
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
"He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like insects.
"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart.
"It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases." "Can it cure the one spiritual disease?" asked Father Brown, with a serious curiosity. "And what is the one spiritual disease?" asked Flambeau, smiling. "Oh, thinking one is quite well," said his friend.
Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
The family physician of the St. Clares quarrelled with that family, and began publishing a violent series of articles, in which he said that the late general was a religious maniac; but as far as the tale went, this seemed to mean little more than a religious man.
Madness and despair are innocent enough. There are worse things, Flambeau."
Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?
