dise for the
saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors. It is the first
full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the
heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity.

We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took
its rise. We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many
centuries. Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of
the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life. One such phase
was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism.
Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate
lineage of Judaism. The next great epoch is the marriage of rational
knowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these last
centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing.

Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common
characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our
immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the
Christian mythology. In other words, the moral rules and spiritual
ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the
conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and
disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the
incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ. Upon this basis was reared a
vast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds,
pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by
multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.

It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of
a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on
before our eyes. To measure the essential significance of the change, we
need not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythology
expanded and solidified itself. We have seen its germs in the story of
Judaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors. The method and nature of
its growth may be briefly indicated.

We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history. All
the threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can trace
the general line of one or two. It is the history of the moral ideas
which have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that we
are trying to pursue. There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining of
such ideas in the life and teaching