epended the sway which they maintained, without ethical importance to
help them, despite philosophy and Christianity. Christianity, born in
an age of speculation and eclecticism, removed its divinities, its
mystic figures, out of the cosmic surroundings of paganism; it forbade
the imagination to touch or alter them, it regularised, defined,
explained, placed the Saviour, the Virgin, the saints and angels, into
a kind of supersensuous world of logic, logic adapted to Heaven, and
different therefore from the logic of earth, but logic none the less.
Christianity endowed them with certain definite attributes, not to be
found among mortals, but analogous in a manner to mortal attributes; the
Christian supernatural system belongs mainly to the category of mistaken
scientific systems; its peculiarities are due, not to overwrought fancy,
but to overtaxed reason. Thus the genuine supernatural was well-nigh
banished by official Christianity, regulated as it was by a sort of
congress of men of science, who eliminated, to the best of their powers,
any vagaries of the imagination which might show themselves in their
mystico-logic system. But the imagination did work nevertheless, and the
supernatural did reappear, both within and without the Christian system
of mythology. The Heaven of theology was too ethical, too logical, too
positive, too scientific, in accordance with the science of the Middle
Ages, for the minds of humanity at large; the scholars and learned
clergy might study and expound it, but it was insufficient for the
ignorant. The imagination reappeared once more. To the monk arose out of
the silence and gloom of the damp, lichen-grown crypt, out of the foetid
emanations of the charnal-house, strange forms of horror which lurked
in his steps and haunted his sleep after fasting and scourging and
vigils; devils and imps horrible and obscene, which the chisel of
the stonecutter vainly attempted to reproduce, in their fluctuating
abomination, on the capitals and gargoyles of cloister and cathedral.
To the artisan, the weaver pent up in some dark cellar into which the
daylight stole grey and faint from the narrow strip of blue sky between
the overhanging eaves, for him, the hungry and toil-worn and weary of
soul, there arose out of the hum of the street above, out of the
half-lit dust, the winter damp and summer suffocation of the underground
workshop, visions and sounds of sweetness and glory, misty clusters of
white-robed ang