On the Oddity of Proper Form

out of the mouths of English journalists (and poets!):

...it occurred to him that perhaps it was not Christianity that was misshapen, but rather its critics. Perhaps it was they who, from their various eccentric points of view, saw the rightly shaped Christianity as distorted: ‘Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark and some too fair. One explanation… would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.’ It could be the case, in short, that ‘it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.’ It is the sheer depth and breadth of the Church, the complexity and multifacetedness of it, which narrow-minded enemies cannot grasp. Christianity, Chesterton surmised, was perhaps, too capacious to be easily comprehended.