It is always about the thing that we love most that we talk most.
About this thing, therefore, our errors are something more than our
deepest errors: they are our most frequent errors. That is why for
nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the
subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated
Christmas, he would have understood it from the first. What would
have happened then, it is impossible to say. For that which is hated,
and therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave, lives on
for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of our
understanding of it--dies, as it were, in our awful grasp. Between
the horns of this eternal dilemma shivers all the mystery of the jolly
visible world, and of that still jollier world which is invisible.
And it is because Mr. Shaw and the writers of his school cannot, with
all their splendid sincerity and, acumen, perceive that he and they
and all of us are impaled on those horns as certainly as the sausages
I ate for breakfast this morning had been impaled on the cook's
toasting-fork--it is for this reason, I say, that Mr. Shaw and his
friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that lies at the root
of all things human and divine.
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