ply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained a
religion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in a
state of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never be
understood by them in its genuine motives and spirit. They were without
the experience and the plastic imagination which had given it birth. It
might catch them unawares and prevail over them for a time, but even
during that period it could not root out from barbarian souls anything
opposed to it which subsisted there. It was thus that the Roman Church
hatched the duck's egg of Protestantism.

[Sidenote: Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism.]

In its native seats the Catholic system prompts among those who inwardly
reject it satire and indifference rather than heresy, because on the
whole it expresses well enough the religious instincts of the people.
Only those strenuously oppose it who hate religion itself. But among
converted barbarians the case was naturally different, and opposition to
the Church came most vehemently from certain religious natures whose
instincts it outraged or left unsatisfied. Even before heresy burst
forth this religious restlessness found vent in many directions. It
endowed Christianity with several beautiful but insidious gifts, several
incongruous though well-meant forms of expression. Among these we may
count Gothic art, chivalrous sentiment, and even scholastic philosophy.
These things came, as we know, ostensibly to serve Christianity, which
has learned to regard them as its own emanations. But in truth they
barbarised Christianity just as Greek philosophy and worship and Roman
habits of administration had paganised it in the beginning. And
barbarised Christianity, even before it became heretical, was something
new, something very different in temper and beauty from the pagan
Christianity of the South and East.

In the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, as it flourished in the North,
the barbarian soul, apprenticed to monkish masters, appeared in all its
childlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touching
and grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys of
age, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antique
metaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structure
of that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had been
undermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed,
but,