ere
fools and blind, but not through defects which would have condemned them
in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and
Rome took small account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that
this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was
the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single
meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the
twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent. 'For as the lightning cometh out
of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the
Son of Man be.' Was it not intelligible that He to whom right and wrong
were so diverse, to whom their diversity was the one fact for man, should
believe that Heaven would proclaim and enforce it? He read more and
more, until at last the key was given to him to unlock even that strange
mystery, that being justified by faith we have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ. Still it was idle for him to suppose that he could
ever call himself a Christian in the sense in which those poor creatures
whom he had seen were Christians. Their fantastic delusions, their
expectation that any day the sky might open and their Saviour appear in
the body, were impossible to him; nor could he share their confidence
that once for all their religion alone was capable of regenerating the
world. He could not, it is true, avoid the reflection that the point was
not whether the Christians were absurd, nor was it even the point whether
Christianity was not partly absurd. The real point was whether there was
not more certainty in it than was to be found in anything at that time
current in the world. Here, in what Paul called faith, was a new spring
of action, a new reason for the blessed life, and, what was of more
consequence, a new force by which men might be enabled to persist in it.
He could not, we say, avoid this reflection; he could not help feeling
that he was bound not to wait for that which was in complete conformity
with an ideal, but to enlist under the flag which was carried by those
who in the main fought for the right, and that it was treason to cavil
and stand aloof because the great issue was not presented in perfect
purity. Nevertheless, he was not decided, and could not quite decide. If
he could have connected Christianity with his own philosophy; if it had
been the outcome, the fulfilment of Plato, his duty would have been so
much simpler; it was the