34 How the Church Has Changed the World single nation that has ever existed and that ever shall exist must pass away. Man, on his own, has devised only two ways of confronting the age and death about him. One way is to pretend not to care, to cultivate the “virtue” of apathy, and to derive what pleasure one can from the hours remaining. The other way is to trust in a guiding providence, of vast power, but also distant from the human heart; to do one’s duty, and resign oneself to whatever fate may bring. In neither of these ways is there any joy, or anything new. Let Easter not grow “old” to us! Let us never lose the shock of that first morning of the new world, greater than the first morning when God saw the light and said that it was good! Nothing like Easter has ever occurred in the history of the world, or ever will—because it comes from outside of the world like an invader, to remake the world and man in it, like leaven in the lump, like a contagion of health, like youth spread by word of mouth and the laying on of hands. The world without Easter is doddering. Nothing is solid; all is like a marble and gold façade over a yawning emptiness. With Easter, and, God help us, not some “spirit of Easter,” not some foolish weakling revival of springtime, but the frighteningly real Resurrection of the flesh of Christ, the whole world is made new again. In Christ, even the Greece of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Bishop
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