But to find out how far one _may_ be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery in psychology.

Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit.

But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can grovel"-- that was an emancipation.
This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance.

Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry.

Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.