ish a serious moral
education. The perpetual painful readjustments of the last twenty
centuries have been adjustments to false facts and imaginary laws; so
that neither could a worthy conception of prosperity and of the good be
substituted for heathen and Hebrew crudities on that subject, nor could
the natural goals of human endeavour come to be recognised and
formulated, but all was left to blind impulse or chance tradition.

[Sidenote: Religion made an institution.]

These defeats of reason are not to be wondered at, if we may indeed
speak of the defeat of what never has led an army. The primitive
naturalism of the Hebrews was not yet superseded by prophetic doctrines
when a new form of materialism arose to stifle and denaturalise what was
rational in those doctrines. Even before hope of earthly empire to be
secured by Jehovah's favour had quite vanished, claims had arisen to
supernatural knowledge founded on revelation. Mythology took a wholly
new shape and alliance with God acquired a new meaning and implication.
For mythology grew, so to speak, double; moral or naturalistic myths
were now reinforced by others of a historical character, to the effect
that the former myths had been revealed supernaturally. At the same time
the sign of divine protection and favour ceased to be primarily
political. Religion now chiefly boasted to possess the Truth, and with
the Truth to possess the secret of a perfectly metaphysical and
posthumous happiness. Revelation, enigmatically contained in Scripture,
found its necessary explication in theology, while the priests, now
guardians of the keys of heaven, naturally enlarged their authority over
the earth. In fine, the poetic legends and patriarchal worship that had
formerly made up the religion of Israel were transformed into two
concrete and formidable engines--the Bible and the Church.

CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

[Sidenote: The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.]

Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally
proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption
within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left
the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a
new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial
abuses. What is capable of truly purifying the world is not the mere
agitation of its elements, but their organisation into a natural body
that shall