n trying to
harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed
doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and
gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a
certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so
deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his
splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the
law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The
essence of Christianity was meant to be a _tabula rasa_. Christ bade
men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of
dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this
respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of
Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ.
Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past; Christ
was concerned with religious instinct, St. Paul with religious
development. The strength of the gospel of Christ was that it depended
rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and
thus made its appeal to the majority of the human race. Plato, on the
other hand, was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was
hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability.
Hugh wondered if it would be possible to put the doctrine of Plato in
such a light that it would appeal to simple people; he thought that it
would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato, like
Christ, employed the device of the parable largely as a means of
interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the
teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended
upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as better
than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is
the strongest motive force in the world in the direction of
self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the
conscious apprehension of the fact that one's life is meant to be noble
and beautiful, and that one has the power to make it nobler and more
beautiful than it is.

It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the development of Christianity, that
perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been
to a great extent a misfortune; it was true that in a sense he had
resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were full
of splendid aphorisms, ins