he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me
no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought
of Christian theology.



V THE FLAG OF THE WORLD


When I was a boy there were two curious men running about
who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used
the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any
very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might
be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said;
for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought
this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought
it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously
raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations.
An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and
nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything
right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion
that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist,
and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious
but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl,
"An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
is a man who looks after your feet." I am not sure that this is not
the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth
in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn
between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact