A heart-shaped outline and a maze's exact plan
If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.
The Edinburgh reference has a concrete visual candidate: the heart-shaped pavement mosaic outside St Giles' Cathedral, marking the site of the Old Tolbooth. The city's tourism account identifies that heart and its association with the former prison. It supplies a recognizable, comparatively simple outline; Chesterton does not require the reader to know the prison's history. Identifying the pavement heart as his intended object is an interpretation, since he does not explain the name here. Forever Edinburgh, ‘The Heart of Midlothian’.
Hampton Court supplies a different kind of shape. Historic Royal Palaces describes its maze, commissioned around 1700, as a trapezoidal puzzle maze with branching choices and dead ends, rather than the single winding route of a unicursal labyrinth. The important comparison is therefore not simply between two unusual outlines. A snowflake reproducing the maze's exact arrangement would match a particular intricate pattern of passages. Historic Royal Palaces, ‘The Hampton Court Maze’.
This prepares the paragraph's last image: a key must match the differentiated structure of its lock. Complexity matters because it permits many particular correspondences to be checked. The analogy does not claim that any complicated creed is true; its condition is that the complicated creed actually fits the complicated world. Both heritage descriptions cited here are modern accounts, not witnesses to the appearance of either landmark in 1908.
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