A portion of these truths had perhaps been suspected by certain wise
men of ancient times, but their full, broad, luminous revelation dates
from the Gospels. The pagan schools walked in darkness, feeling their
way, clinging to falsehoods as well as to truths in their haphazard
journeying. Some of their philosophers occasionally cast upon certain
subjects feeble gleams which illuminated but one side and made the
darkness of the other side more profound. Hence all the phantoms
created by ancient philosophy. None but divine wisdom was capable of
substituting an even and all-embracing light for all those flickering
rays of human wisdom. Pythagoras, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, are
torches: Christ is the glorious light of day.

Nothing could be more material, indeed, than the ancient theogony. Far
from proposing, as Christianity does, to separate the spirit from the
body, it ascribes form and features to everything, even to impalpable
essences, even to the intelligence. In it everything is visible,
tangible, fleshly. Its gods need a cloud to conceal themselves from
men's eyes. They eat, drink, and sleep. They are wounded and their
blood flows; they are maimed, and lo! they limp forever after. That
religion has gods and halves of gods. Its thunderbolts are forged on
an anvil, and among other things three rays of twisted rain (_tres
imbris torti radios_) enter into their composition. Its Jupiter
suspends the world by a golden chain; its sun rides in a four-horse
chariot; its hell is a precipice the brink of which is marked on the
globe; its heaven is a mountain.

Thus paganism, which moulded all creations from the same clay,
minimizes divinity and magnifies man. Homer's heroes are of almost the
same stature as his gods. Ajax defies Jupiter, Achilles is the peer
of Mars. Christianity on the contrary, as we have seen, draws a broad
line of division between spirit and matter. It places an abyss between
the soul and the body, an abyss between man and God.

At this point--to omit nothing from the sketch upon which we have
ventured--we will call attention to the fact that, with Christianity,
and by its means, there entered into the mind of the nations a new
sentiment, unknown to the ancients and marvellously developed
among moderns, a sentiment which is more than gravity and less than
sadness--melancholy. In truth, might not the heart of man, hitherto
deadened by religions purely hierarchical and sacerdotal, awake and
feel springin