ysical charity and joy. It would have remained unconscious, as the
Gospel is, that the hand or the mind of man can ever construct anything.
Among the Jews there were no liberal interests for the ideal to express.
They had only elementary human experience--the perpetual Oriental round
of piety and servitude in the bosom of a scorched, exhausted country. A
disillusioned eye, surveying such a world, could find nothing there to
detain it; religion, when wholly spiritual, could do nothing but succour
the afflicted, understand and forgive the sinful, and pass through the
sad pageant of life unspotted and resigned. Its pity for human ills
would go hand in hand with a mystic plebeian insensibility to natural
excellence. It would breathe what Tacitus, thinking of the liberal life,
could call _odium generis humani_; it would be inimical to human genius.

[Sidenote: Double appeal of Christianity.]

There were, we may say, two things in Apostolic teaching which rendered
it capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish morality
and mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ's parables and maxims,
and illustrated by his miracles, those cures and absolutions which he
was ready to dispense, whatever their sins, to such as called upon his
name. This democratic and untrammelled charity could powerfully appeal
to an age disenchanted with the world, and especially to those lower
classes which pagan polity had covered with scorn and condemned to
hopeless misery. The other point of contact which early Christianity had
with the public need was the theme it offered to contemplation, the
philosophy of history which it introduced into the western world, and
the delicious unfathomable mysteries into which it launched the fancy.
Here, too, the figure of Christ was the centre for all eyes. Its
lowliness, its simplicity, its humanity were indeed, for a while,
obstacles to its acceptance; they did not really lend themselves to the
metaphysical interpretation which was required. Yet even Greek fable was
not without its Apollo tending flocks and its Demeter mourning for her
lost child and serving in meek disguise the child of another. Feeling
was ripe for a mythology loaded with pathos. The humble life, the
homilies, the sufferings of Jesus could be felt in all their
incomparable beauty all the more when the tenderness and tragedy of
them, otherwise too poignant, were relieved by the story of his
miraculous birth, his glorious resurrection,