--Beginnings of the Church.--Bigotry turned into a
principle.--Penance accepted.--Christianity combines optimism and
asceticism.--Reason smothered between the two.--Religion made an
institution Pages 69-82

CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.--A universal
religion must interpret the whole world.--Double appeal of
Christianity.--Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.--Hebrew philosophy
of history identified with Platonic cosmology.--The resulting orthodox
system.--The brief drama of things.--Mythology is a language and must be
understood to convey something by symbols Pages 83-98

CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

Need of paganising Christianity.--Catholic piety more human than the
liturgy.--Natural pieties.--Refuge taken in the supernatural.--The
episodes of life consecrated mystically.--Paganism chastened, Hebraism
liberalised.--The system post-rational and founded on despair.--External
conversion of the barbarians.--Expression of the northern genius within
Catholicism,--Internal discrepancies between the two.--Tradition and
instinct at odds in Protestantism.--The Protestant spirit remote from
that of the gospel.--Obstacles to humanism.--The Reformation and
counter-reformation.--Protestantism an expression of character.--It has
the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.--Its
emancipation from Christianity Pages 99-126

CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.--But myth is confused
with the moral values it expresses.--Neo-Platonic revision.--It made
mythical entities of abstractions.--Hypostasis ruins ideals.--The Stoic
revision.--The ideal surrendered before the physical.--Parallel
movements in Christianity.--Hebraism, if philosophical, must be
pantheistic.--Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.--Truly
divine action limited to what makes for the good.--Need of an opposing
principle.--The standard of value is human.--Hope for happiness makes
belief in God Pages 127-147

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

Suspense between hope and disillusion.--Superficial solution.--But from
what shall we be redeemed?--Typical attitude of St. Augustine.--He
achieves Platonism.--He identifies it with Christianity.--God the
good.--Primary and secondary religion.--Ambiguous efficacy of the good
in Plato.--Ambiguous goodness of the