When the Christian world, recovering its balance by means of the Renaissance, once more accepted the worth of antiquity, it refused to surrender the new treasure which it had gained in its temporary recoil from humanism. Popes on the throne retained the symbol which had comforted slaves in the Catacombs. The same cross survived the Reformation and persists, plastically and verbally, as the sign of modern Christianity. Until lately this paradox was as strange, in its way, as that of a Borgian posing as Vicar of the Crucified. Last year I saw all kinds of people trying to obliterate suffering: the intellectualists were denying its efficacy, the humanitarians its necessity, the Christian Scientists its reality. In our various modern forms of speech we were addressing prayers to Hygeia, enshrined on the Acropolis.
Then, with terrible suddenness, the roar of guns interrupted us.
Some one light in the encircling gloom we must have, if we are to work our way out into a renewal of civilization. Are we to discover it by still another paradox, in the very mystery of suffering which we have been denying? If one of your sons (which God forbid!) should be brought home mutilated, you would not choose to remember him in his young strength and beauty, because he would seem more beautiful to you stretched upon his cross. You would not rest in your agony, or in your fierce anger that such things are possible in the world. You would pass from these to the conviction that his suffering for France made his humanity divine. I do not pretend to understand the matter. I only know it to be true. Even the Greeks presaged it at Eleusis, but they forgot it as they turned homeward. For us it still lies beyond reason, but is beginning to be clearer than the axioms of reason. The mystery of suffering is more lucid than the fact of well-being.
My friend, may we not look upon this as the answer of Golgotha to the Acropolis?
The Baby arrived in a howling nor'easter. The _fjelds_ were white with driving snow, the sea was white with the spindrift of gale-lashed waves, when the little procession filed into the parsonage courtyard. There were a father, five godfathers, two godmothers, and a few non-official friends. No baby was visible, but a muffled gurgle betrayed her presence. One of the godfathers, a fine young Viking of a lad, had a woman's dress-skirt buttoned around his neck and hanging down in front. Within its warm folds was the Baby.