pectation, still
did not arrive; Christ was the giver of eternal life now. More and more
the emphasis shifted from what Christ would do for his people when he
came upon the clouds of heaven to what he was doing for them through his
spiritual presence with them. Even in the Fourth Gospel one finds this
good news that Christ had already come again in the hearts of his people
insisted on in evident contrast with the apocalyptic hope literally
conceived. For another thing, dramatic hopes of a sudden invasion of the
world are always the offspring of desperate conditions. Only when people
are hard put to it do they want history catastrophically stopped in the
midst of its course. The Book of Daniel must be explained by the
tyrannies of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Book of Revelation by the
persecutions of Domitian, the present recrudescence of pre-millennialism
by the tragedy of the Great War. But when the persecution of the Church
by the State gave way to the running of the State by the Church; when to
be a Christian was no longer a road to the lions but the sine qua non of
preferment and power; when the souls under the altar ceased crying, "How
long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our
blood on them that dwell on the earth?" then the apocalyptic hopes grew
dim and the old desire for a kingdom immediately to come was subdued to
an expectation, no longer imperative and urgent, that sometime the course
of history would stop on Judgment Day.

In all these Greek and Roman, Hebrew and Christian contributions, which
flowed together and then flowed out into the medieval age, there was no
suggestion of a modern idea of progress, and in the medieval age itself
there was nothing to create a fresh phrasing of expectancy. Men were
aware of the darkness of the days that had fallen on the earth; even when
they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, their thoughts of
greatness did not reach forward toward a golden age ahead but harked back

"To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"

and their intellectual life, instead of being an adventurous search for
new truth, was a laborious endeavour to stabilize the truth already
formulated in the great days of the early Church. Indeed, the Church's
specific contribution of a vividly imagined faith in a future world, as
the goal of the most absorbing hopes and fears of men, tended rather to
confirm than to dissipate the static concep