After many frustrations, a belligerent Catholic and a trenchant atheist are seeking to settle their quarrel at sword point. An opportunity quite literally dawns on them. "The sunrise, which was broadening over the sea and shore, was one of those rare and splendid ones in which there seems to be no mist or doubt, and nothing but a universal clarification more and more complete. All the colours were transparent. It seemed like a triumphant prophecy of some perfect world where everything being innocent will be intelligible; a world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of burning glass," writes GK Chesterton in his 1909 entertainment The Ball and the Cross.
"Such a world is fiercely figured in the coloured windows of Christian architecture. The sea that lay before them was like a pavement of emerald, bright and almost brittle; the sky against which its strict horizon hung was almost absolutely white, except that close to the sky line, lay strings of flaky cloud of so gleaming and gorgeous a red that they seemed cut out of some strange, blood-red celestial metal, of which the mere gold of this earth is but a drab yellow imitation. 'The hand of Heaven is still pointing' muttered the man of superstition to himself. 'And now it is a blood-red hand.'" The would-be duellists reach the sand. The sun beats down "and every bird that rose with that sunrise caught a light like a star upon it like the dove of the Holy Spirit."