But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.

For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption.

Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.

_They_ gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural.

It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.