



Produced by Ben Crowder







THE BALL AND THE CROSS

G.K. Chesterton



CONTENTS

    I. A Discussion Somewhat in the Air
   II. The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate
  III. Some Old Curiosities
   IV. A Discussion at Dawn
    V. The Peacemaker
   VI. The Other Philosopher
  VII. The Village of Grassley-in-the-Hole
 VIII. An Interlude of Argument
   IX. The Strange Lady
    X. The Swords Rejoined
   XI. A Scandal in the Village
  XII. The Desert Island
 XIII. The Garden of Peace
  XIV. A Museum of Souls
   XV. The Dream of MacIan
  XVI. The Dream of Turnbull
 XVII. The Idiot
XVIII. A Riddle of Faces
  XIX. The Last Parley
   XX. Dies Irae




I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR

The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a
silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak
blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no
expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the
stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had
also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus
had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look
which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and
evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the
world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas
remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone
mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin,
forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an enormous key
with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver. That
object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews
was really the key. The thing which might have been mistaken for a
tricycle turned upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument
to which the corkscrew was the key. All these things, as I say, the
professor had invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship,
with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too
late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had
considerably improved it.

There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time. Him,
also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him
he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with
a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure
object of improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely
covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he
seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect
he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony
garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations
of exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been
burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They
were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really
a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been
intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune
was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to
understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael,
and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite
happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild
animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in
the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.

"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer,
"of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your
traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere ordinary
knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us
not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious
people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the
rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders
with men of all kinds----"

"You will forgive me," said the monk, meekly from under loads of white
beard, "but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub
my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?"

"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own
basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion
and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky
is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now
you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it
how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man's
real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the
heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth
is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This
mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom
has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing,
more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath
you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old.
The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once
condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more
homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."

"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a
slight cough, "but I have always noticed----"

"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really like
to draw out your simple ideas."

"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point
of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I
have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular conclusion,
which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign
language."

"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you out. How
did my view strike you?"

"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow
it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most
eloquence, when--er--when----"

"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.

"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run
into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's
running into something now."

Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the
handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they
had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now,
through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them
what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded
in a sea of cloud. The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.

"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a new
planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other vulgar
one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will have no
chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be
as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel--here the
intellect----"

"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking up in
the middle of it."

"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship,
his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. "What can it be? It
might of course be merely a----"

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung
up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way;
he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the
world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they
see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of
the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by
driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing
into St. Paul's Cathedral.

A plain of sad- cloud lay along the level of the top of the
Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding
on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of
cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert. Hence it
gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship
cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without
resistance. There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there
was no shock. It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so
much butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than
those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and
nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness
warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog
fell until it warmed into fire. Through the