, the
faculty of expressing spiritual experience in myth and external symbol,
and, second, the experience of disillusion, forcing that pagan
imagination to take wing from earth and to decorate no longer the
political and material circumstances of life, but rather to remove
beyond the clouds and constitute its realm of spirit beyond the veil of
time and nature, in a posthumous and metaphysical sphere. A mythical
economy abounding in points of attachment to human experience and in
genial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature and
filling a reported world, a world believed in on hearsay or, as it is
called, on faith--that is Catholicism.

When this religion was established in the Roman Empire, that empire was
itself threatened by the barbarians who soon permeated and occupied it
and made a new and unhappy beginning to European history. They adopted
Christianity, not because it represented their religious needs or
inspiration, but because it formed part of a culture and a social
organisation the influence of which they had not, in their simplicity,
the means to withstand. During several ages they could only modify by
their misunderstandings and inertia arts wholly new to their lives.

[Sidenote: External conversion of the barbarians.]

What sort of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond
our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically
different from the Graeco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely
conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which
religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind,
like a child's, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you
will. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monks
told them about hell and heaven, God the Father and God the Son, the
Virgin and the beautiful angels; they accepted the sacraments with vague
docility; they showed a qualified respect, often broken upon, it is
true, by instinctive rebellions, for a clergy which after all
represented whatever vestiges of learning, benevolence, or art still
lingered in the world. But this easy and boasted conversion was fanciful
only and skin-deep. A non-Christian ethics of valour and honour, a
non-Christian fund of superstition, legend, and sentiment, subsisted
always among mediaeval peoples. Their soul, so largely inarticulate,
might be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment in
the pano