ews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the pagan
and Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty in
restoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul of
the gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the language
of Messianic hopes, is really post-rational. It was not to marry and be
given in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysical
mysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in this
life, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and to
follow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. It
was not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of
their exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and
the change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh
excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary
austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human
desires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, falling
like the Father's gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might take
the place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a
renunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his more spiritual
disciples, did not spring from disappointed illusion or lead to other
unregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. It
sprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to
the divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the
spirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetch
from contemplation.

[Sidenote: Consequent electicism.]

This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism,
gave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence in
later times. Those who were inwardly convinced--as most religious minds
were under the Roman Empire--that all earthly things were vanity, and
that they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not of
torment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world,
carry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purely
negative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a
discipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict nature
more boldly than one intended to take nature's place. The hope of
unimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenzies
than it could have fallen int