ds precisely those
actions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of
justice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy
and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made for
the complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts
of obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thus
virtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity
in a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the type
regarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to the
benefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here and
attributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures that
entertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The
character of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox among
us are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not the
character of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world
lacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverse
existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by
his inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted
with all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, like
Prometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthly
blessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon
the cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebuked
in their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and
united, by their common indifference to the world, in one mystic
brotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready to
learn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their
heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and
desperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all
civic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan
world to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.

All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneath
this theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, and
broke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of each
man as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christ
remained in men's hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so that
even now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being pure
children of nature, are without