Reflections of a stormy petrel

My mind, as you are aware, is naturally pessimistic, and I find materialism easier to believe than the Christian doctrine. However, once I realized as a historian that the Christian documents were first-class historical documents with the same claim on our belief as, say, Caesar's accounts of his own wars, then the story they told imposed itself to my mind. I knew enough of the literary culture of the time to know that to write fiction in those terms was simply impossible; this was not an invented story in the sense in which the Hellenistic novels or the book of Jonah are invented stories. This was something told and believed as fact, like Caesar or Cicero told their own experiences as facts. And moving from that, I ended up finding so many ways in which the Christian doctrine fitted the human experience like, as Chesterton puts it, a key fits a lock. (Take, for instance, the matter of gratitude, mentioned above; or the centrality of love.) It is, to me, a matter of intellectual honesty to believe in the Christian message, even against my own inclination.