exude what redounds and absorb or generate what is lacking to
the perfect expression of its soul.

Whence fetch this seminal force and creative ideal? It must evidently
lie already in the matter it is to organise; otherwise it would have no
affinity to that matter, no power over it, and no ideality or value in
respect to the existences whose standard and goal it was to be. There
can be no goods antecedent to the natures they benefit, no ideals prior
to the wills they define. A revolution must find its strength and
legitimacy not in the reformer's conscience and dream but in the temper
of that society which he would transform; for no transformation is
either permanent or desirable which does not forward the spontaneous
life of the world, advancing those issues toward which it is already
inwardly directed. How should a gospel bring glad tidings, save by
announcing what was from the beginning native to the heart?

[Sidenote: A universal religion must interpret the whole world.]

No judgment could well be shallower, therefore, than that which condemns
a great religion for not being faithful to that local and partial
impulse which may first have launched it into the world. A great
religion has something better to consider: the conscience and
imagination of those it ministers to. The prophet who announced it first
was a prophet only because he had a keener sense and clearer premonition
than other men of their common necessities; and he loses his function
and is a prophet no longer when the public need begins to outrun his
intuitions. Could Hebraism spread over the Roman Empire and take the
name of Christianity without adding anything to its native inspiration?
Is it to be lamented that we are not all Jews? Yet what makes the
difference is not the teaching of Jesus--which is pure Hebraism reduced
to its spiritual essence--but the worship of Christ--something perfectly
Greek. Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect had it not been
made at once speculative, universal, and ideal by the infusion of Greek
thought, and at the same time plastic and devotional by the adoption of
pagan habits. The incarnation of God in man, and the divinisation of man
in God are pagan conceptions, expressions of pagan religious sentiment
and philosophy. Yet what would Christianity be without them? It would
have lost not only its theology, which might be spared, but its
spiritual aspiration, its artistic affinities, and the secret of its
metaph