n, for
common sense, for fairness to human nature, and generally for what may
be called the naturalness of Christianity.--As also for its comely
order: she would be "brought to her king in raiment of needlework." It
was by the bishops of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the
true catholic sense, into universal pastors, that the path of what we
must call humanism was thus defined.

[123] And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at last the
catholic church might venture to show her outward lineaments as they
really were, worship--"the beauty of holiness," nay! the elegance of
sanctity--was developed, with a bold and confident gladness, the like
of which has hardly been the ideal of worship in any later age. The
tables in fact were turned: the prize of a cheerful temper on a candid
survey of life was no longer with the pagan world. The aesthetic charm
of the catholic church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent
and expressive in the better mind of man, her outward comeliness, her
dignifying convictions about human nature:--all this, as abundantly
realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval
church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the
masters of sacred music in the middle age--we may see already, in dim
anticipation, in those charmed moments towards the end of the second
century. Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake
of Marcus Aurelius himself, for a brief space of time we may discern
that influence clearly predominant there. What might seem harsh as
dogma was already justifying itself as worship; according to the sound
rule: Lex orandi, lex credendi--Our Creeds are but the brief abstract
of our prayer and song.

The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her wholly unparalleled
genius for worship, [124] being thus awake, she was rapidly
re-organising both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the
expanding therein of her own new heart of devotion. Like the
institutions of monasticism, like the Gothic style of architecture, the
ritual system of the church, as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks
as one of the great, conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary,
products of human mind. Destined for ages to come, to direct with so
deep a fascination men's religious instincts, it was then already
recognisable as a new and precious fact in the sum of things. What has
been on the whole the method of the church, as "a