may be said to have acquired
His sovereignty as did the Roman Caesar. He absorbed into His own person
the offices of all the gods that were before him, as the Roman Caesar
absorbed all the offices of the state; and in His case also, as has been
said of the Roman Caesar, the whole was immeasurably greater than the
mere sum of the parts. Scientifically and philosophically He became the
first cause of the world; He became the father of the human soul, and
its judge; and what is more, its rest and its delight, and its desire.
Under the light of this conception, man appeared an ampler being. His
thoughts were for ever being gazed on by the great controller of all
things; he was made in the likeness of the Lord of lords; he was of kin
to the power before which all the visible world trembled; and every
detail in the life of a human soul became vaster, beyond all comparison,
than the depths of space and time. But not only did the sense of man's
dignity thus develop, and become definite. The accompanying sense of his
degradation became intenser and more definite also. The gloom of a sense
of sin is to be found in AEschylus, but this gloom was vague and
formless. Christianity gave to it both depth and form; only the despair
that might have been produced in this way was now softened by hope.
Christianity has, in fact, declared clearly a supernatural of which men
before were more or less ignorantly conscious. The declaration may or
may not have been a complete one, but at any rate it is the completest
that the world has yet known. And the practical result is this: when we,
in these days, deny the supernatural, we are denying it in a way in
which it was never denied before. Our denial is beyond all comparison
more complete. The supernatural, for the ancient world, was like a
perfume scenting life, out of a hundred different vessels, of which only
two or three were visible to the same men or nations. They therefore
might get rid of these, and yet the larger part of the scent would still
remain to them. But for us, it is as though all the perfume had been
collected into a single vessel; and if we get rid of this, we shall get
rid of the scent altogether. Our air will be altogether odourless.

The materialism of Lucretius is a good instance of this. In many ways
his denials bear a strong resemblance to ours. But the resemblance
ceases a little below the surface. He denied the theology of his time as
strongly as our positive thinkers de