the Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation of
Christianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and of
necessity. There was now another force in the field, the virgin
conscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached to
what they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the fact
that they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in so
uncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitive
Christianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive,
utterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanistic
movement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious and
ostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, as
puerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that the
peoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender their
ancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this new
barbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They might
have suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly
prosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their
supernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to
abandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a
foreign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? What
happened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cut
themselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered it
innocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment was
only to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutual
slaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies.

[Sidenote: Protestantism an expression of character.]

It would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history of
Protestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning by
intelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descent
into a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediate
positions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelation
to private experience can succeed only for a time and where local
influences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down to
the bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reach
out pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on this
rather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the Angli