y may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and
the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the
intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It
flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all
existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at
the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by
the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the
cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,
from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for
prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly
comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.

It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might
wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human
society. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its
Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not
his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven
is his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a
nation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at
baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic pa