antinomian; it loves contemplation,
poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfelt
forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it
is a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and a
profound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignity
and high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of
all this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;
it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness,
solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonourable punishment. It
is constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a married
and industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to
it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which such
an existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is
meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to
piety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a
sort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominent
in the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its
benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional
well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which,
being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and
looks to spiritual freedom and peace.

Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to the Old
Testament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly and
pre-rational form. It is not democratic in the same sense as
post-rational religions, which see in the soul an exile from some other
sphere wearing for the moment, perhaps, a beggar's disguise: it is
democratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending
easily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it is
necessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestly
materialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses the
vulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, and
adventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an
earthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy
child, pure but unchastened energies. Thus in the Protestant religion
the faith natural to barbarism appears clothed, by force of historical
accident, in the language of an adapted Christianity.

[Sidenote: Obstacles to humanism.]

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