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He that is down needs fear no fall, and the corollary is…
This church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit. For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of the Gothic: the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsyturvydom of stone in mid-air. Details of stone, enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a corner seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures or villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.
‘I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places, even to pray,’ said Father Brown. ‘Heights were made to be looked at, not looked from.’
‘Do you mean that one might fall over?’, asked Wilfred.
‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t’, said the other priest.
‘I scarcely understand you’, remarked Bohun indistinctly.
‘Look at that blacksmith, for instance’, went on Father Brown calmly; ‘a good man, but not a Christian – hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven. Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak…I knew a man who began by worshipping God with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God. So that though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.’
This extract from The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) (The Hammer of God) by G K Chesterton is taken from the Lion Literature Collection compiled by Mary Batchelor.
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