PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY
[Sidenote: Need of paganising Christianity.]
The western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had to sublimate
it into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics. In like manner the western
heart had to render Christianity congenial and adequate by a rich
infusion of pagan custom and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentle
and facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined to impute an
abstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot souls of early
Christians, and to ignore that mysterious and miraculous side of later
paganism from which Christian cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. In
the third century Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious
sense, closely akin; each differed much less from the other than from
that religion which at other epochs had borne or should bear its own
name. Had Julian the Apostate succeeded in his enterprise he would not
have rescued anything which the admirers of classic paganism could at
all rejoice in; a disciple of Iamblichus could not but plunge headlong
into the same sea of superstition and dialectic which had submerged
Christianity. In both parties ethics were irrational and morals corrupt.
The political and humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and the
question between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice of
fanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation,
although decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline,
a certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage
remained in the world. The people could change their gods, but not the
spirit in which they worshipped them. Christianity had insinuated itself
almost unobserved into a society full of rooted traditions. The first
disciples had been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men of
other races and interests could never have adopted intelligently; the
Church was accordingly wise enough to perpetuate in its practice at
least an indispensable minimum of popular paganism. How considerable
this minimum was a glance at Catholic piety will suffice to convince us.
[Sidenote: Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.]
The Græco-Jewish system of theology constructed by the Fathers had its
liturgical counterpart in the sacraments and in a devout eloquence which
may be represented to us fairly enough by the Roman missal and breviary.
This liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removed
thereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible,
keeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone. Psalms
abound, Virgin, and saints are barely mentioned, a certain universalism
and concentration of thought upon the Redemption and its speculative
meaning pervades the Latin ritual sung behind the altar-rails. But any
one who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent interpreter will at
once perceive the immense distance which separates that official and
impersonal ritual from the daily prayers and practices of Catholic
people. The latter refer to the real exigences of daily life and serve
to express or reorganise personal passions. While mass is being
celebrated the old woman will tell her beads, lost in a vague rumination
over her own troubles; while the priests chant something unintelligible
about Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will light her
wax-candles, duly blessed for the occasion, before Saint Barbara, to be
protected thereby from the lightning; and while the preacher is
repeating, by rote, dialectical subtleties about the union of the two
natures in Christ’s person, a listener’s fancy may float sadly over the
mystery of love and of life, and (being himself without resources in the
premises) he may order a mass to be said for the repose of some departed
soul.
In a Catholic country, every spot and every man has a particular patron.
These patrons are sometimes local worthies, canonised by tradition or by
the Roman see, but no less often they are simply local appellations of
Christ or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically to
refer all to the same _numen_, but which practically possess diverse
religious values; for the miracles and intercessions attributed to the
Virgin under one title are far from being miracles and intercessions
attributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devout
to Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at
Saragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception
for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Each
religious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it will
cultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are also
particular places and days on which graces are granted, as not on
others, and the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonic
standards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of a
certain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts and
remissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders.
One man’s spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to
another, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but which
is really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like the
atonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead and
living.
[Sidenote: Natural pieties.]
Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequent
festivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships, fields, labours, and
seasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by the
living for the lesser dead—a perfect survival of heroes and penates on
the one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the
other. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints’ and all
souls’, Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes’s and
Saint Valentine’s days with their profane associations, a saint for
finding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since all
great and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the
Virgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, with
what more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism within
Christian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found in
the gospel, the mass, the breviary, or the theologians.
Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, for
they rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacy
of your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is
perched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle
of it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivals
associated with them, have entered your mind together with your earliest
feelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with
the awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ were
invoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches
of irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mystic
resource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. When
the doctors blunder—as they commonly do—the saints may find a cure;
after all, the saints’ success in medicine seems to a crude empiricism
almost as probable as the physicians’. Special and local patrons are the
original gods, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmic
deities retain they retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those very
bonds with human interests and passionate desires which ancestral demons
once borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted,
or the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softened
toward their worshippers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreating
theology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, no
determinate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it nor
allied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortify
and define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigation
of evils or for assistance against them to the very being that has
decreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own.
[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural.]
Paganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religious
notions, optimistic and material; the worshipper expected his piety to
make his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and to
render harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But such
faith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced at
every turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life,
when they are understood at all, have to be understood on an opposite
principle, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished us
with a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a free
field and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion to
the supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far from
belonging. Now this retreat, in the case of classic paganism, took place
with the decay of military and political life and would have produced an
ascetic popular system, some compound of Oriental and Greek traditions,
even if Christianity had not intervened at that juncture and opportunely
pre-empted the ground.
[Sidenote: The episodes of life consecrated mystically.]
Christianity, as we have seen, had elements in it which gave it a
decisive advantage; its outlook was historical, not cosmic, and
consequently admitted a non-natural future for the individual and for
the Church; it was anti-political and looked for progress only in that
region in which progress was at that time possible, in the private soul;
it was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity and
prophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroes
or polite metaphysical entities; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, like
music, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. The
consequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led a
dual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it was
piety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope and
consolation in a region parallel to earth and directly above it, every
part of which corresponded to something in earthly life and could be
reached, so to speak, by a Jacob’s ladder upon which aspiration and
grace ascended and descended continually. Birth had its sacramental
consecration to the supernatural in baptism, growth in confirmation,
self-consciousness in confession, puberty in communion, effort in
prayer, defeat in sacrifice, sin in penance, speculation in revealed
wisdom, art in worship, natural kindness in charity, poverty in
humility, death in self-surrender and resurrection. When the mind grew
tired of contemplation the lips could still echo some pious petition,
keeping the body’s attitude and habit expressive of humility and
propitious to receiving grace; and when the knees and lips were
themselves weary, a candle might be left burning before the altar, to
witness that the desire momentarily forgotten was not extinguished in
the heart. Through prayer and religious works the absent could be
reached and the dead helped on their journey, and amid earthly
estrangements and injustices there always remained the church open to
all and the society of heaven.
[Sidenote: Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised.]
Nothing is accordingly more patent than that Christianity was paganised
by the early Church; indeed, the creation of the Church was itself what
to a Hebraising mind must seem a corruption, namely, a mixing of pagan
philosophy and ritual with the Gospel. But this sort of constitutive
corruption would more properly be called an adaptation, an absorption,
or even a civilisation of Hebraism; for by this marriage with paganism
Christianity fitted itself to live and work in the civilised world. By
this corruption it was completed and immensely improved, like
Anglo-Saxon by its corruption through French and Latin; for it is always
an improvement in religion, whose business is to express and inspire
spiritual sentiment, that it should learn to express and inspire that
sentiment more generously. Paganism was nearer than Hebraism to the Life
of Reason because its myths were more transparent and its temper less
fanatical; and so a paganised Christianity approached more closely that
ideality which constitutes religious truth than a bare and intense
Hebraism, in its hostility to human genius, could ever have done if
isolated and unqualified.
[Sidenote: The system post-rational and founded on despair.]
The Christianity which the pagans adopted, in becoming itself pagan,
remained a religion natural to their country and their heart. It
constituted a paganism expressive of their later and calamitous
experience, a paganism acquainted with sorrow, a religion that had
passed through both civilisation and despair, and had been reduced to
translating the eclipsed values of life into supernatural symbols. It
became a post-rational religion. Of course, to understand such a system
it is necessary to possess the faculties it exercises and the experience
it represents. Where life has not reached the level of reflection,
religion and philosophy must both be pre-rational; they must remain
crudely experimental, unconscious of the limits of excellence and life.
Under such circumstances it is obviously impossible that religion should
be reconstituted on a supernatural plane, or should learn to express
experience rather than impulse. Now the Christianity of the gospels was
itself post-rational; it had turned its back on the world. In this
respect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforced
the spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal and
metaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classic
philosophy—Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean—was founded on despair and was
post-rational. Pagan Christianity, or Catholicism, may accordingly be
said to consist of two elements: first, the genius of paganism, the
faculty of expressing spiritual experience in myth and external symbol,
and, second, the experience of disillusion, forcing that pagan
imagination to take wing from earth and to decorate no longer the
political and material circumstances of life, but rather to remove
beyond the clouds and constitute its realm of spirit beyond the veil of
time and nature, in a posthumous and metaphysical sphere. A mythical
economy abounding in points of attachment to human experience and in
genial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature and
filling a reported world, a world believed in on hearsay or, as it is
called, on faith—that is Catholicism.
When this religion was established in the Roman Empire, that empire was
itself threatened by the barbarians who soon permeated and occupied it
and made a new and unhappy beginning to European history. They adopted
Christianity, not because it represented their religious needs or
inspiration, but because it formed part of a culture and a social
organisation the influence of which they had not, in their simplicity,
the means to withstand. During several ages they could only modify by
their misunderstandings and inertia arts wholly new to their lives.
[Sidenote: External conversion of the barbarians.]
What sort of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond
our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically
different from the Græco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely
conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which
religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind,
like a child’s, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you
will. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monks
told them about hell and heaven, God the Father and God the Son, the
Virgin and the beautiful angels; they accepted the sacraments with vague
docility; they showed a qualified respect, often broken upon, it is
true, by instinctive rebellions, for a clergy which after all
represented whatever vestiges of learning, benevolence, or art still
lingered in the world. But this easy and boasted conversion was fanciful
only and skin-deep. A non-Christian ethics of valour and honour, a
non-Christian fund of superstition, legend, and sentiment, subsisted
always among mediæval peoples. Their soul, so largely inarticulate,
might be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment in
the panoply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained a
religion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in a
state of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never be
understood by them in its genuine motives and spirit. They were without
the experience and the plastic imagination which had given it birth. It
might catch them unawares and prevail over them for a time, but even
during that period it could not root out from barbarian souls anything
opposed to it which subsisted there. It was thus that the Roman Church
hatched the duck’s egg of Protestantism.
[Sidenote: Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism.]
In its native seats the Catholic system prompts among those who inwardly
reject it satire and indifference rather than heresy, because on the
whole it expresses well enough the religious instincts of the people.
Only those strenuously oppose it who hate religion itself. But among
converted barbarians the case was naturally different, and opposition to
the Church came most vehemently from certain religious natures whose
instincts it outraged or left unsatisfied. Even before heresy burst
forth this religious restlessness found vent in many directions. It
endowed Christianity with several beautiful but insidious gifts, several
incongruous though well-meant forms of expression. Among these we may
count Gothic art, chivalrous sentiment, and even scholastic philosophy.
These things came, as we know, ostensibly to serve Christianity, which
has learned to regard them as its own emanations. But in truth they
barbarised Christianity just as Greek philosophy and worship and Roman
habits of administration had paganised it in the beginning. And
barbarised Christianity, even before it became heretical, was something
new, something very different in temper and beauty from the pagan
Christianity of the South and East.
In the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, as it flourished in the North,
the barbarian soul, apprenticed to monkish masters, appeared in all its
childlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touching
and grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys of
age, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antique
metaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structure
of that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had been
undermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed,
but, clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To races
without experience—that is, without cumulative traditions or a visible
past—Christianity could be nothing but a fairy story and a gratuitous
hope, as if they had been told about the Sultan of Timbuctoo and
promised that they should some day ride on his winged Arabian horses.
The tragic meaning of the Christian faith, its immense renunciation of
all things earthly and the merely metaphysical glory of its transfigured
life, commonly escaped their apprehension, as it still continues to do.
They listened open-mouthed to the missionary and accepted his
asseverations with unsuspecting emotion, like the Anglo-Saxon king who
likened the soul to a bird flying in and out of a tent at night, about
whose further fortunes any account would be interesting to hear. A seed
planted in such a virgin and uncultivated soil must needs bring forth
fruit of a new savour.
[Sidenote: Internal discrepancies between the two.]
In northern Christianity a fresh quality of brooding tenderness
prevailed over the tragic passion elsewhere characteristic of Catholic
devotion. Intricacy was substituted for dignity and poetry for rhetoric;
the basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ages
were a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were
there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was
here a poet’s childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an
alchemist’s old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish.
Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister;
gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the
cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was
the theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, their
curiosity and tenderness; it was far from being the source of those
delightful inventions. The Crusades were not inspired by the Prince of
Peace, to whose honour they were fancifully and passionately dedicated;
so chivalry, Gothic architecture, and scholastic philosophy were profane
expressions of a self-discovering genius in a people incidentally
Christian. The barbarians had indeed been indoctrinated, they had been
introduced into an alien spiritual and historic medium, but they had not
been made over or inwardly tamed. It had perhaps been rendered easier
for them, by contact with an existing or remembered civilisation, to
mature their own genius, even in the act of confusing its expression
through foreign accretions. They had been thereby stimulated to civilise
themselves and encouraged also to believe themselves civilised somewhat
prematurely, when they had become heirs merely to the titles and
trappings of civilisation.
The process of finding their own art and polity, begun under foreign
guidance, was bound on the whole to diverge more and more from its Latin
model. It consisted now of imitation, now of revulsion and fanciful
originality; never was a race so much under the sway of fashions.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without
reason and imitation without benefit. It marks very clearly that margin
of irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a people
artificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. It
is characteristic of occidental society in mediæval and modern times,
because this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreign
culture, remain barbarians at heart. To this day we have not achieved a
really native civilisation. Our art, morals, and religion, though deeply
dyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed,
conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the
northern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than
among the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in
society, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated
and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on
different intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some
educated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; they
sit at the feet of a past which, not being really theirs, can produce no
fruit in them but sentimentality. Others are merely _protestants_; they
are active in the moral sphere only by virtue of an inward rebellion
against something greater and overshadowing, yet repulsive and alien.
They are conscious truants from a foreign school of life.
[Sidenote: Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism.]
In the Protestant religion it is necessary to distinguish inner
inspiration from historical entanglements. Unfortunately, as the whole
doctrinal form of this religion is irrelevant to its spirit and imposed
from without, being due to the step-motherly nurture it received from
the Church, we can reach a conception of its inner spirit only by
studying its tendency and laws of change or its incidental expression in
literature and custom. Yet these indirect symptoms are so striking that
even an outsider, if at all observant, need not fear to misinterpret
them. Taken externally, Protestantism is, of course, a form of
Christianity; it retains the Bible and a more or less copious selection
of patristic doctrines. But in its spirit and inward inspiration it is
something quite as independent of Judea as of Rome. It is simply the
natural religion of the Teutons raising its head above the flood of
Roman and Judean influences. Its character may be indicated by saying
that it is a religion of pure spontaneity, of emotional freedom, deeply
respecting itself but scarcely deciphering its purposes. It is the
self-consciousness of a spirit in process of incubation, jealous of its
potentialities, averse to definitions and finalities of any kind because
it can itself discern nothing fixed or final. It is adventurous and
puzzled by the world, full of rudimentary virtues and clear fire,
energetic, faithful, rebellious to experience, inexpert in all matters
of art and mind. It boasts, not without cause, of its depth and purity;
but this depth and purity are those of any formless and primordial
substance. It keeps unsullied that antecedent integrity which is at the
bottom of every living thing and at its core; it is not acquainted with
that ulterior integrity, that sanctity, which might be attained at the
summit of experience through reason and speculative dominion. It
accordingly mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe, for
spiritual life.
[Sidenote: The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel.]
This underlying Teutonic religion, which we must call Protestantism for
lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can survive it.
To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible so long as, in
opposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal to
the Gospel for support. The Gospel has indeed nothing pagan about it,
but it has also nothing Teutonic; and the momentary alliance of two such
disparate forces must naturally cease with the removal of the common
enemy which alone united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted,
ascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt,
conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a danger,
earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it revels in
miracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation,
poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfelt
forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it
is a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and a
profound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignity
and high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of
all this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;
it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness,
solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonourable punishment. It
is constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a married
and industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to
it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which such
an existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is
meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to
piety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a
sort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominent
in the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its
benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional
well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which,
being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and
looks to spiritual freedom and peace.
Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to the Old
Testament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly and
pre-rational form. It is not democratic in the same sense as
post-rational religions, which see in the soul an exile from some other
sphere wearing for the moment, perhaps, a beggar’s disguise: it is
democratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending
easily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it is
necessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestly
materialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses the
vulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, and
adventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an
earthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy
child, pure but unchastened energies. Thus in the Protestant religion
the faith natural to barbarism appears clothed, by force of historical
accident, in the language of an adapted Christianity.
[Sidenote: Obstacles to humanism.]
As the Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constituted
their culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It was
naturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism
principally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken
philosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it
was a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious
vested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the
path of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be
easily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which
for a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism,
instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to
sincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to
experience—scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation,
which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how
artificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism,
under such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it was
not favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain to
penetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age,
would naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or ideal
ambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; either
the gay world to suit the Church’s primitive austerity and asceticism,
or the Church to suit the world’s profane and general interests. The
latter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists who
would have abated the clergy’s wealth and irrational authority, advanced
polite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity—for why
should an ancestral religion be changed?—would have retained it as a
form of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life.
This movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformation
and the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met with
many a check from the Church’s sincere zealots; but it could have
overcome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason’s battle with
reason’s weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenment
without dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and national
passions, or vitiating philosophy.
[Sidenote: The Reformation and counter-reformation.]
It was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and soften
the Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation of
Christianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and of
necessity. There was now another force in the field, the virgin
conscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached to
what they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the fact
that they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in so
uncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitive
Christianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive,
utterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanistic
movement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious and
ostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, as
puerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that the
peoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender their
ancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this new
barbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They might
have suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly
prosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their
supernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to
abandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a
foreign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? What
happened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cut
themselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered it
innocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment was
only to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutual
slaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies.
[Sidenote: Protestantism an expression of character.]
It would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history of
Protestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning by
intelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descent
into a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediate
positions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelation
to private experience can succeed only for a time and where local
influences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down to
the bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reach
out pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on this
rather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the Anglican
Church, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only its
feeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by the
Christian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the
spirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression
it gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human
instinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance,
against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards
and punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as
by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an
independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it
says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all
meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be
by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the
spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall
be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith
and by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion
may not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to
other facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in
daily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual
adjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a
man learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its
multifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.
[Sidenote: It has the spirit of life.]
Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and
self-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive
than reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could
speak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant
fashion. “He that formed us,” they would say, “lives and energises
within us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are
faithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our
hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him,
we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for
ever.” This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two
corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be
called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one’s own
impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to
reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and
practices—of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of
idolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than
relative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of
tradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise
the soul’s experimental development as, in profound isolation, she
wrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.
[Sidenote: and of courage.]
In thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a fine
courage proportionate to its own vigour. We may well imagine that lions
and porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side
than ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance,
when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and
high-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to
hold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It is
a part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some
laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere
habit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point
is to accomplish something, no matter particularly what; so that
Protestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when he
has once achieved success. A certain experience of ill fortune is only a
stimulus to this fidelity. So great is the antecedent trust in the world
that the world, as it appears at first blush, may be confidently defied.
[Sidenote: but the voice of inexperience.]
Hence, in spite of a theoretic optimism, disapproval and proscription
play a large part in Protestant sentiment. The zeal for righteousness,
the practical expectation that all shall be well, cannot tolerate
recognised evils. Evils must be abolished or at least hidden; they must
not offend the face of day and give the lie to universal sanctimony.
This austerity and repression, though they involve occasional hypocrisy,
lead also to substantial moral reconstruction. Protestantism, springing
from a pure heart, purifies convention and is a tonic to any society in
which it prominently exists. It has the secret of that honest simplicity
which belongs to unspoiled youth, that keen integrity native to the
ungalled spirit as yet unconscious of any duplicity in itself or of any
inward reason why it should fail. The only evils it recognises seem so
many challenges to action, so many conditions for some glorious
unthought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant, it
is the religion of inexperience, yet it has, at its core, the very
spirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotent and
sacred and not to distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that
of possible success. Success, however, would never be possible without
that fund of energy and that latent resolve and determination which
bring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator and
disinfectant in the world.
[Sidenote: Its emancipation from Christianity.]
It was this youthful religion—profound, barbaric, poetical—that the
Teutonic races insinuated into Christianity and substituted for that
last sigh of two expiring worlds. In the end, with the complete
crumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotism
appeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculative
philosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at a moment of high
tension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turn
and take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on the
part of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from
Christianity and the end of that series of transformations in which it
took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fair
to apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to
attempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homely
sources.