Re: Parsing timestamps?

Recently someone told me about Christianity - how it wasn't meant to be
easy - supposed to be, among other things, a denial of the senses.

"...I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now;
and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong.
I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very
wrong indeed.  Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing,
but that thing must be very strange and solitary.  There are men
who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare.  There are
men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare.  But if this mass
of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty,
too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously
to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge,
a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed,
then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.
For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such
exceptional corruption.  Christianity (theoretically speaking)
was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.
THEY gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural.
It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite
as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that
Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell.  Really, if Jesus
of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
     And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still
thunderbolt.  There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.
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 (as
has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape.
But there is another explanation.  He might be the right shape.
Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short.  Very short men
might feel him to be tall.  Old bucks who are growing stout might
consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing
thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance.
Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man,
while negroes considered him distinctly blonde.  Perhaps (in short)
this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least
the normal thing, the centre.  Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity
that is sane and all its critics that are mad -- in various ways.
I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any
of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation.
I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock.  For instance,
it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity
at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp.  But then
it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined
extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp.
The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.
But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before
ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes.  The modern man
found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex;
he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.
The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees.
The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.
And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it
was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe.  If there was any
insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread
and wine.
     I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far."
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