"It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing."

"it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity.  I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.  It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing."

     G. K. Chesterton, "The paradoxes of Christianity," Orthodoxy (London:  John Lane, 1909), 182.