It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We
are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the
duty of that wrestling.
But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a
command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no
keener joy known to man.
I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this
deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and
accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes
upon the ground ...
There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in
historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which
never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a
term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of
judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the
vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable
life - all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely
to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no
longer entirely to be admired.
