Christopher Palmer

“I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes--epic on epic, Iliad on Iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself...But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday