And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.
But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism.

And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket.

I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism.

But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world.

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do _not_ fit in to the world.