eir morality. True, the old positivism remained in
the background. Tribulation was to be short-lived. Very soon the kingdom
of God would be established and a dramatic exchange of places would
ensue between the proud and the humble. The mighty would be hurled from
their seat, the lowly filled with good things. Yet insensibly the
conception of a kingdom of God, of a theocracy, receded or became
spiritualised. The joys of it were finally conceived as immaterial
altogether, contemplative, and reserved for a life after death. Although
the official and literal creed still spoke of a day of judgment, a
resurrection of the body, and a New Jerusalem, these things were
instinctively taken by Christian piety in a more or less symbolic sense.
A longing for gross spectacular greatness, prolonged life, and many
children, after the good old Hebraic fashion, had really nothing to do
with the Christian notion of salvation. Salvation consisted rather in
having surrendered all desire for such things, and all expectation of
happiness to be derived from them. Thus the prophet's doctrine that not
prosperity absolutely and unconditionally, but prosperity merited by
virtue, was the portion of God's people changed by insensible gradations
to an ascetic belief that prosperity was altogether alien to virtue and
that a believer's true happiness would be such as Saint Francis paints
it: upon some blustering winter's night, after a long journey, to have
the convent door shut in one's face with many muttered threats and
curses.

[Sidenote: Reason smothered between the two.]

In the history of Jewish and Christian ethics the pendulum has swung
between irrational extremes, without ever stopping at that point of
equilibrium at which alone rest is possible. Yet this point was
sometimes traversed and included in the gyrations of our tormented
ancestral conscience. It was passed, for example, at the moment when the
prophets saw that it was human interest that governed right and wrong
and conduct that created destiny. But the mythical form in which this
novel principle naturally presented itself to the prophets' minds, and
the mixture of superstition and national bigotry which remained in their
philosophy, contaminated its truth and were more prolific and contagious
than its rational elements. Hence the incapacity of so much subsequent
thinking to reach clear ideas, and the failure of Christianity, with its
prolonged discipline and opportunities, to establ