Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.”

Even the practical had become the impracticable. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. “All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time that the world could not save itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame.” Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations.

He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He cannot sleep in his own skin he cannot trust his own instincts. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. “The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.

Chesterton the everlasting man