honey were to
flow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsion
from nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted last
judgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was only
temporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils.
Despair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though at
first it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction.
This was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom of
Christian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of one
very like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice,
it was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit
miraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged or
punished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. The
earthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as a
trial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, would
thereafter begin.

[Sidenote: The two factors meet in Christianity.]

Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalism
intercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness.
Its moral principle is reason--the only moral principle there is; its
motive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy.
Christianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principles
after a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by opening
up new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities and measures of success.
The Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping the
world of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values may
take place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience,
self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire a
religious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcely
have found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merely
incidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground that
human nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged and
transformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts and
become again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of God
men would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be truly
natural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere.

This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage from
the J