"What is meant by the fall?"

In the dark hours of the night, when we wonder about sin and evil, and especially that sin and evil that persists in our own lives, we wonder what it meant that Adam fell, and how we participate in that fall, in that sin. And so wondered G. K. Chesterton, and here are his thoughts:

"And to the question, 'What is meant by the fall?' I could answer with complete sincerity, 'That whatever I am, I am not myself.' That is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves. And there is really no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. It is only since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation."