pagan
philosophy and ritual with the Gospel. But this sort of constitutive
corruption would more properly be called an adaptation, an absorption,
or even a civilisation of Hebraism; for by this marriage with paganism
Christianity fitted itself to live and work in the civilised world. By
this corruption it was completed and immensely improved, like
Anglo-Saxon by its corruption through French and Latin; for it is always
an improvement in religion, whose business is to express and inspire
spiritual sentiment, that it should learn to express and inspire that
sentiment more generously. Paganism was nearer than Hebraism to the Life
of Reason because its myths were more transparent and its temper less
fanatical; and so a paganised Christianity approached more closely that
ideality which constitutes religious truth than a bare and intense
Hebraism, in its hostility to human genius, could ever have done if
isolated and unqualified.

[Sidenote: The system post-rational and founded on despair.]

The Christianity which the pagans adopted, in becoming itself pagan,
remained a religion natural to their country and their heart. It
constituted a paganism expressive of their later and calamitous
experience, a paganism acquainted with sorrow, a religion that had
passed through both civilisation and despair, and had been reduced to
translating the eclipsed values of life into supernatural symbols. It
became a post-rational religion. Of course, to understand such a system
it is necessary to possess the faculties it exercises and the experience
it represents. Where life has not reached the level of reflection,
religion and philosophy must both be pre-rational; they must remain
crudely experimental, unconscious of the limits of excellence and life.
Under such circumstances it is obviously impossible that religion should
be reconstituted on a supernatural plane, or should learn to express
experience rather than impulse. Now the Christianity of the gospels was
itself post-rational; it had turned its back on the world. In this
respect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforced
the spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal and
metaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classic
philosophy--Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean--was founded on despair and was
post-rational. Pagan Christianity, or Catholicism, may accordingly be
said to consist of two elements: first, the genius of paganism