o if its object had been merely to silence
the will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it
tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious
hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism,
extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like
Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It
looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be
crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These
were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped
at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his
natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and
much more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with
anaesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

Another consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rational
with pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopes
of a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the two
factors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that included
both. Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised the
pre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first. To
the spiritually minded, whose religion was founded on actual insight and
disillusion, the joys of heaven could never be more than a symbol for
the intrinsic worth of sanctity. To the worldling those heavenly joys
were nothing but a continuation of the pleasures and excitements of this
life, serving to choke any reflections which, in spite of himself, might
occasionally visit him about the vanity of human wishes. So that
Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of
morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in disruptive
movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one
Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be
practising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the
busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God's name, all
their hot and miscellaneous passions.

[Sidenote: The negation of naturalism never complete.]

This contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannot
be avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Every
post-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory. Its despair
cannot be uni