clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To races
without experience--that is, without cumulative traditions or a visible
past--Christianity could be nothing but a fairy story and a gratuitous
hope, as if they had been told about the Sultan of Timbuctoo and
promised that they should some day ride on his winged Arabian horses.
The tragic meaning of the Christian faith, its immense renunciation of
all things earthly and the merely metaphysical glory of its transfigured
life, commonly escaped their apprehension, as it still continues to do.
They listened open-mouthed to the missionary and accepted his
asseverations with unsuspecting emotion, like the Anglo-Saxon king who
likened the soul to a bird flying in and out of a tent at night, about
whose further fortunes any account would be interesting to hear. A seed
planted in such a virgin and uncultivated soil must needs bring forth
fruit of a new savour.

[Sidenote: Internal discrepancies between the two.]

In northern Christianity a fresh quality of brooding tenderness
prevailed over the tragic passion elsewhere characteristic of Catholic
devotion. Intricacy was substituted for dignity and poetry for rhetoric;
the basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ages
were a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were
there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was
here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an
alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish.
Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister;
gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the
cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was
the theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, their
curiosity and tenderness; it was far from being the source of those
delightful inventions. The Crusades were not inspired by the Prince of
Peace, to whose honour they were fancifully and passionately dedicated;
so chivalry, Gothic architecture, and scholastic philosophy were profane
expressions of a self-discovering genius in a people incidentally
Christian. The barbarians had indeed been indoctrinated, they had been
introduced into an alien spiritual and historic medium, but they had not
been made over or inwardly tamed. It had perhaps been rendered easier
for them, by contact with an existing or remembered civilisation, to
mature their own