nd Christ
meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the
Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to
be the absence of everything. The world understands its own
routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of
changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or
measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns
nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that
power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old
ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the
next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being
unlimited; in some cases it is very small....

But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit--the power of
propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on
it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity
should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever
heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass
rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt
outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from
lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to
legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the
Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the
Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to
suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but
through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that
can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to
the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an
entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over
the streets and palaces of the city of God....

Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there
sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
conventionalism.

Christianity, then, wou