THE ENDLESS EMPIRE
One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding
that popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say.
We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have
seen the fact. We make a picture of the things we do not know
out of the things we know; and suppose the traveller's tale
to mean no more abroad than it would at home. If a man acquainted
only with English churches is told about certain French churches
that they are much frequented, he makes an English picture.
He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best
clothes going all together at eleven o'clock, and all coming back
together to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impression
he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of
the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it
were a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a man knowing only English
beer-shops hears for the first time of a German beer-garden,
he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place.
He does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the top
of his beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture,
beer will go on flowing into it as from a natural fountain;
the drinking of beer being regarded as the normal state of man,
and the cessation of it a decisive and even dramatic departure.
I do not give this example in contempt; heaven forbid.
I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of Prussianised Germany
that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more
generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany
once more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instance
of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going
or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something
much more special, than we should infer from our own land.
Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities
or temples in the Near East: "The Bedouins camp in the ruins."
When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town
or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies
near some place like Stonehenge. They would make their own rude shelter
near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire;
and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without
making much difference. The thing I saw more than once in Egypt
and Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies set
to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence.
It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle
of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to
turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion.
In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense
much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops
short of the true creative independence of going off and building
a house of their own. That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs
through all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque
of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion.
It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments,
it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions
or even shams.
I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls
of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making
an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour.
He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does
he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and
he has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly
superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition,
or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody
else's house and half in his own. The real quality is probably too
subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there
is in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common sense;
which might even be called a short-sighted common sense.
But however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arab
conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency.
That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they
have succeeded and failed. In that sense they are constructive
and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that
sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical;
in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent. The curtains they
would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours.
The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious
courage and enthusiasm. The prayers they recited in Stonehenge
might be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a great
improvement on its older associations of human sacrifice. All this
is true of Islam and the idolatries and negations are often replaced.
But they would not have built Stonehenge; they would scarcely,
so to speak, have troubled to lift a stone of Stonehenge.
They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisbury
or Glastonbury or Lincoln.
That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it,
after its ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in a
subtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts,
he sees this influence as I first described it, very present
and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me
and to others it is partly striking only because it is strange.
Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is at
first like entering a new world. But, in my own case at any rate,
as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I saw
more of the established seats of history, the cities and the framework
of the different states, I became conscious of something else.
It was something underneath, undestroyed and even in a sense unaltered.
It was something neither Moslem nor modern; not merely oriental and yet
very different from the new occidental nations from which I came.
For a long time I could not put a name to this historical atmosphere.
Then one day, standing in one of the Greek churches, one of those houses
of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me.
It was the Empire. And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits
we call the Turkish Empire. The thing which had caught my eye
in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle
in such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a cross.
Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might well
suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an
Established Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ.
But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire;
it would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle.
The double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Rome
and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to
the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset.
Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late
as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria
as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire. And what I
felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something
older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself.
I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over
Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such
as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China.
I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and
handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets.
They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty
routine of some far-off official system. In so far as the eagle was
an emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant imperial wars,
it was of wars that we in the West have hardly heard of;
it was the emblem of official ovations.
When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With
the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.
That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery
of the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion,
when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls
of stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praise
or blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified,
the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations.
It was an endless end of the world; for ever repeating its rich finality.
And I myself was still walking in that long evening of the earth;
and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium.
But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was not
always at its evening. Byzantium was not always Byzantine.
Nor was the seat of that power always in the city of Constantine,
which was primarily a mere outpost of the city of Caesar.
We must remember Rome as well as Byzantium; as indeed
nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome.
The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved
round that original idea which may be called the Mediterranean;
and the fact that it became two empires, but remained one civilisation,
just as it has become two churches, but remained one religion.
In this little world there is a story attached to every word;
and never more than when it is the wrong word. For instance,
we may say that in certain cases the word Roman actually means Greek.
The Greek Patriarch is sometimes called the Roman Patriarch;
while the real Roman Patriarch, who actually comes from Rome, is only
called the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium.
The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundred
very vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmen
by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merely
decadent and the notion that the Middle Ages were merely dark.
As a fact, even the Dark Ages were not merely dark.
And even the Byzantine Empire was not merely Byzantine.
It seems a little unfair that we should take the very title
of decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet
more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city.
I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word
as "Constantinopolitan." But it would surely be a better word for
stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems
and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was
that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome.
Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city,
and though and priest or soldier who came out of it might be
speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics in
these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation.
But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation.
Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops
degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a
sounder historical instinct, "The monks of the imperial race."
The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial
city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim
to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor.
That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this
distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see
of Rome sometimes bear the strange name of "The Romans."
Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other.
We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture;
not half so much. The people who say that parliaments or pictures
or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic
race from the north can be disposed of by the simple question:
why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?
Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the neighbourhood
of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace
of Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion
is no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the roads
of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons;
and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came
from Germany. If I looked about in these parts for a local emblem
like that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion.
The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art both
hagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which I
shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he lived
with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicate
humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters.
That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should
appear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems
are in theory forbidden so to carve images of living things.
Some say the Persian Moslems are less particular; but whatever
the explanation, two lions of highly heraldic appearance are carved
over that Saracen gate which Christians call the gate of St. Stephen;
and the best judges seem to agree that, like so much of the Saracenic
shell of Zion, they were partly at least copied from the shields
and crests of the Crusaders.
And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well be
the text for a whole book on the subject. For if they indicate,
however indirectly, the presence of the Latins of the twelfth century,
they also indicate the earlier sources from which the Latin life had
itself been drawn. The two lions are pacing, passant as the heralds
would say, in two opposite directions almost as if prowling to and fro.
And this also might well be symbolic as well as heraldic.
For if the Crusaders brought the lion southward in spite of
the conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was only because
the Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the cold
seas and the savage forests. The image of the lion came from north
to south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come
from south to north. The Christian had a symbolic lion he had
never seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw.
For we could deduce from the case of this single creature
the fact that all our civilisation came from the Mediterranean,
and the folly of pretending that it came from the North Sea.
Those two heraldic shapes over the gate may be borrowed from the Norman
or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England. They may
have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King
of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion.
They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast
or jest of our own comic papers when they talk about the British Lion.
But why are there lions, though of French or feudal origin,
on the flag of England? There might as well be camels or crocodiles,
for all the apparent connection with England or with France.
Why was an English king described as having the heart of a lion, any more
than of a tiger? Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the world
with the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if they
warned it against stimulating the rage of the British rhinoceros.
Why did not the French and English princes find in the wild boars,
that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their heraldry?
If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of Scandinavian
piracy, why did they not display three wolves on their shields?
Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull,
or the English bull-dog?
The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name
of John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome;
and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If there
had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation,
we should expect the surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we should
expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not
the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the
mystic who mused with his burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos.
If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately
because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the
tapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture,
like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean.
And if this is true of our use of the word "bull," it is obviously
even truer of our use of the word "lion." The later emblem is enough
to show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean,
but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean.
In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea;
the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle of
the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands
that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one
that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.
In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard
the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers
in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he.
His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in
knowing where he was and why he was there. It arose from the fact
that in his time there remained a sort of memory of the Roman Empire,
which some would have re-established as a Holy Roman Empire.
Christendom was still almost one commonwealth; and it seemed to Richard
quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called
England to the opposite edge of it that happened to be called Palestine.
We may think him right or wrong in the particular quarrel,
we may think him innocent or unscrupulous in his incidental methods;
but there is next to no doubt whatever that he did regard
himself not merely as conquering but as re-conquering a realm.
He was not like a man attacking total strangers on a hitherto
undiscovered island. He was not opening up a new country,
or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast none
of those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the more
enlightened pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguish
republics for the sake of a gold-mine or an oil-field. Some day,
if our modern educational system is further expanded and enforced,
the whole of the past of Palestine may be entirely forgotten;
and a traveller in happier days may have all the fresher sentiments
of one stepping on a new and nameless soil. Disregarding any dim
and lingering legends among the natives, he may then have the honour
of calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking on
a new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville.
But King Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the full
freshness of this sort of adventure. He was not riding into Asia thus
romantically and at random; indeed he was not riding into Asia at all.
He was riding into Europa Irredenta.
But that is to anticipate what happened later and must be
considered later. I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan
and political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of
the Crusade on the merely pagan and political side. In one sentence,
it meant that Rome had to recover what Byzantium could not keep.
But something further had happened as affecting Rome than anything
that could be understood by a man standing as I have imagined
myself standing, in the official area of Byzantium. When I have
said that the Byzantian civilisation seemed still to be reigning,
I meant a curious impression that, in these Eastern provinces,
though the Empire had been more defeated it has been less disturbed.
There is a greater clarity in that ancient air; and fewer clouds of real
revolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun.
This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreign
religion has successfully fought and ruled. But indeed the enigma
is also the explanation. In the East the continuity of culture
has only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done.
In the West it has been interrupted by positive things that
Christendom itself has done. In the West the past of Christendom
has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East
it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round
Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That, I incline
to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west
of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void.
It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence
of the experiments of parliament and popular representation,
the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality.
In the East the civilisation lived on, or if you will, lingered on;
in the West it died and was reborn. But for a long time, it should
be remembered, it must have seemed to the East merely that it died.
The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of barbaric war,
while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous in the sun.
The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was stiffening
and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not
have revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle.
It was something else that was destined to reveal it.
The Crusades meant many things; but in this matter they meant one thing,
which was like a word carried to them on the great west wind.
And the word was like that in an old Irish song: "The west is awake."
They heard in the distance the cries of unknown crowds and felt
the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came
the trampling of horses and the noise of harness and of horns of war;
new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men full of hope
crying out in the old Roman tongue "Id Deus vult," Rome was risen
from the dead.
Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things
that he has looked at the few things that he has seen.
I mean the things that come to him with a curious clearness;
so that he actually sees them to be what he knows them to be.
I might almost say that he can believe in them although he has seen them.
There can be no rule about this realisation; it seems to come in
the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speak
for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others.
In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at
Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving
me beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description.
The church is entered through a door so small that it it might fairly
be called a hole, in which many have seen, and I think truly,
a symbol of some idea of humility. It is also said that the wall
was pierced in this way to prevent the appearance of a camel
during divine service, but even that explanation would only repeat
the same suggestion through the parable of the needle's eye.
Personally I should guess that, in so far as the purpose was practical,
it was meant to keep out much more dangerous animals than camels,
as, for instance, Turks. For the whole church has clearly been
turned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickened
in some or all of its thousand years of religious war. In the blank
spaces above the little doorway hung in old times that strange
mosaic of the Magi which once saved the holy place from destruction,
in the strange interlude between the decline of Rome and the rise
of Mahomet. For when the Persians who had destroyed Jerusalem rode
out in triumph to the village of Bethlehem, they looked up and saw
above the door a picture in coloured stone, a picture of themselves.
They were following a strange star and worshipping an unknown child.
For a Christian artist, following some ancient Eastern tradition
containing an eternal truth, had drawn the three wise men with
the long robes and high head-dresses of Persia. The worshippers
of the sun had come westward for the worship of the star.
But whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it is
now or coloured with the gold and purple images of the Persians,
the inside of the church would always be by comparison abruptly dark.
As familiarity turns the darkness to twilight, and the twilight
to a grey daylight, the first impression is that of two rows
of towering pillars. They are of a dark red stone having much
of the appearance of a dark red marble; and they are crowned
with the acanthus in the manner of the Corinthian school.
They were carved and set up at the command of Constantine;
and beyond them, at the other end of the church beside the attar,
is the dark stairway that descends under the canopies of rock
to the stable where Christ was born.
Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it
were crushing, were these red columns of Constantine.
In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that want
saying and cannot be said. Never have I felt so vividly the great
fact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a huge
bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men
who made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world.
To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it was
possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him.
All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know
the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple
to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know
what he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin
like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different?
Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous
about Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ours
we cannot hope to understand it, and if the spirit was like ours,
the spirit was expressed in images that no longer express it.
But it is here that he and I meet; and salute the same images
in the end.
In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of
sympathy with strange things that went through me in that
twilight of the tall pillars, like giants robed in purple,
standing still and looking down into that dark hole in the ground.
Here halted that imperial civilisation, when it had marched in triumph
through the whole world; here in the evening of its days it came
trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings.
For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one
that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave.
And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down
into that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars
in his own sky were dead. They were deities no longer but only
a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius.
The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die
for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable
immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were
chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead.
There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood,
though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and
seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black
hole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark;
and it had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do.
It had disappeared.
There are some who resent the presence of such purple beside
the plain stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that they
always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red
plush of a parvenu; a mere insensibility to a mere incongruity.
For in fact the insensibility is in the critics and not the artists.
It is an insensibility not to an accidental incongruity but to an
artistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat
tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who
make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail
to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale,
even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors
and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of
the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting
on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger,
it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been
conscious of the contrast themselves. I confess this is an insensibility,
not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I
find very fatiguing. I do not mind a man not believing a story,
but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression)
by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point of
the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie.
And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy
inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design.
He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar
maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really _a
mariage de convenance_; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but
not without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience,"
any more than _hors d'oeuvre_ is the French for "out of work";
but may be more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match."
But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maid
conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have
thought the story worth telling if it had been. It is like saying
that Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of Alexander,
must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek architecture;
or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly inconsistent
with court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable cookery book.
I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a lie;
but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might even
say the joke of it. I do not object to his rejecting the story
as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see
the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle
or spire of that sublime tower.
This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many
sacred things as it does that of the shrine of Bethlehem.
It is applied to the divine reality of Bethlehem itself,
as when sceptics still sneer at the littleness, the localism,
the provincial particularity and obscurity of that divine origin;
as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a contrast
which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have
incessantly shouted and proclaimed. In this capital case, of course,
the same principle holds. A man may think the tale is incredible;
but it would never have been told at all if it had not been incongruous.
But this particular case of the lesser contrast, that between the imperial
pomp and the rustic poverty of the carpenter and the shepherds,
is alone enough to illustrate the strange artistic fallacy involved.
If it be the point that an emperor came to worship a carpenter,
it is as artistically necessary to make the emperor imperial
as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plain
people that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds,
it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as that
the shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectuals
do not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough
even to try to make modern intellectualism popular. Now this
conception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concession
to common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerable
bearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasm
that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire.
It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebuked
historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad.
They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of
all nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds,
because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic
as their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovable
as their native land. In many other matters indeed, besides this
popular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice.
Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians against
the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christians
the very human indulgences that they have praised in heathens.
The same arts and allegories, the same phraseologies and philosophies,
which appear first as proofs of heathen health turn up later
as proofs of Christian corruption. It was noble of pagans to
be pagan, but it was unpardonable of Christians to be paganised.
They never tire of telling us of the glory that was Greece,
the grandeur that was Rome, but the Church was infamous because it
satisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the Roman power.
Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meet
the claims of philosophy I will not here dwell at length.
I will only remark in passing that it is an utter fallacy
to suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests in his fascinating
_Outline of History_, that the subtleties of theology were
a mere falling away from the simplicities of religion.
Religion may be better simple for those who find it simple;
but there are bound to be many who in any case find it subtle,
among those who think about it and especially those who doubt about it.
To take an example, there is no saying which the humanitarians
of a broad religion more commonly offer as a model of simplicity
than that most mystical affirmation "God is Love." And there is
no theological quarrel of the Councils of the Church which they,
especially Mr. Wells, more commonly deride as bitter and barren than
that at the Council of Nicea about the Co-eternity of the Divine Son.
Yet the subtle statement is simply a metaphysical explanation
of the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even to
make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not love
when there was nothing to be loved. Now the Church Councils
were originally very popular, not to say riotous assemblies.
So far from being undemocratic, they were rather too democratic;
the real case against them was that they passed by uproarious votes,
and not without violence, things that had ultimately to be considered
more calmly by experts. But it may reasonably be suggested, I think,
that the concentration of the Greek intellect on these things did
gradually pass from a popular to a more professional or official thing;
and that the traces of it have finally tended to fade from the
official religion of the East. It was far otherwise with the more
poetical and therefore more practical religion of the West.
It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affection
in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King.
In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered
its youth. That is the meaning of the movement I have described
as the awakening of the West and the resurrection of Rome.
And the whole point of that movement, as I propose to suggest,
was that it was a popular movement. It had returned with exactly
that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem.
Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into
that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed
to end in the entrails of the earth. The men who followed him passed on,
as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark Ages;
but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that world
of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living.
They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men
have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds
of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will,
and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds.