been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.
It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white,
like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has
always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination
of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.
It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to
a dirty gray. In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity
might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour:
not merely the absence of a colour. All that I am urging here can
be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these
cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture
like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot
silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges
of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It IS true
that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight;
and it IS true that those who fought were like thunderbolts
and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply
means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use
its Tolstoyans. There must be SOME good in the life of battle,
for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be
SOME good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem
to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes)
was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other.
They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples
of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead
of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity
of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run