And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and water. Continents approached no regular shape. Mountains stood out like pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran anywhither, just as the haphazard slope of earth's crevices directed; upon the map you saw quite clearly that their streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land with any pretense of equity. There was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature, no harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, not even a straight line. It was all at loose ends.
But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed rudimentary, yet the goal was recognizable. The branches of a tree did not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite plan in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort toward true balance: the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you saw this never entirely successful effort.
And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again this effort, more creditably performed. All life seemed about the rather childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of two equal and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this effort was foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage or scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went the eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be divided into two equal halves…
But even so, there was no real symmetry in man's body save in externals. The heart was not in the center; there was no order in the jumbled viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix on the right; even the lines in the palm of one hand were unlike those which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some irrational discrepancy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had attained at most only a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry toward which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to ignore. Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision went, could be divided into two similar halves – save only in man's handiwork. Here, again, insects approached man's efforts more closely than the rest of creation; for many of them builded almost as truly. But man, alone in the universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a dinner-table or a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was droll, and no less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance…
But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life was trying to evolve symmetry – order, proportion and true balance. Living creatures represented life's gropings toward that goal. You saw, no doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human beings – that to-morrow living would begin to be symmetrical, well-plotted and coherent, like the progress of a novel… And that was precisely what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the story's milieu fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle. Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged according to art's canons alone. The universe was life's big barren studio, which the Artist certainly had neither planned nor builded, but had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of the earmarks of being by the same author. They were not in similar style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and planets, it would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make both a man's eyes of the same color.
It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our rector informs me, is deplorably rare in these lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To believe this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God's efforts and attention had for a long while strained Kennaston's credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you considered earth's relative value in the universe. But now Felix Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no part of his plan, if indeed there had been any pre-meditation or contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth – not even in the solar system of which earth made a part – was any sense of proportion evinced; and there it was apparent only in living things. Kennaston seemed to glimpse an Artist-God, with a commendable sense of form – Kennaston's fellow craftsman -the earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God was working just now, and all life as a romance the God was inditing…
That the plot of this romance began with Eden and reached its climax at Calvary, Kennaston was persuaded, solely and ardently, because of the surpassing beauty of the Christ-legend. No other myth compared with it from an æsthetic standpoint. He could imagine no theme more adequate to sustain a great romance than this of an Author suffering willingly for His puppets' welfare; and mingling with His puppets in the similitude of one of them; and able to wring only contempt and pity from His puppets – since He had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to comprehend their Creator's nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much the plight which Kennaston had invented for his own puppets at Storisende, as Kennaston complacently reflected. It was the most tremendous situation imaginable; and quite certainly no Author could ever have failed to perceive, and to avail Himself of, its dramatic possibilities. To conceive that the world-romance did not center upon Calvary was to presume an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the basic principles of His art. His sense of pathos and of beauty and of irony could have led Him to select no other legend. And in the inconsistencies and unsolved problems, or even the apparent contradictions, of Christianity, Felix Kennaston could see only a possible error or omission on the Author's part, such as was common to all romances. A few errata did not hamper the tale's worth and splendor, or render it a whit less meritorious of admiration…
And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was in harmony with quite orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. How could a God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by witnessing the torment of His own son? What pleasure, whereby He was propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on Calvary? Or was the God, as priests had taught so long (within the same moment that they proclaimed the God's omnipotence) notwholly a free agent, because bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish some one for humanity's disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting an innocent victim? For if you granted that, you conceded to be higher than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat injustice. Since Schleiermacher's time, at least, as Kennaston discovered, there had been reasoning creatures to contest the possibility of such discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the "subjective" theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ came, not primarily to be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost inevitable, result of human obtuseness; and was pregnant with value only in that thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly evinced. The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus satisfied, not any demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from without, "but God's total nature by revealing it and realizing it in humanity." The God, in short, had satisfied Himself "by revealing and expressing His nature" in the material universe, precisely as lesser artists got relief from the worries of existence by depicting themselves in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in words, so here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard Rothe, and of von Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; and in America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton Clarke. The list was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at one with so many reputable theologians. For all these scholars had dimly divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the God's satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the character of Christ…