ardly agree with him in finding
his new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led
to no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody,
that fidelity would have been folly. There is a noble folly which
consists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to
render it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case
of such noble folly if we were not somehow assured of its ultimate
fruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits
of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the
silence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of God
and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness,
incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this
attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish
not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole
Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some
window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness
without being less irrational and vain.

[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in God.]

Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest
good which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of
human interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism
of peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from
the natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity
conceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of
human nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.
If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because
the decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great
despair in all noble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a
hand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind
and maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they
should remain for ever in hell-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal
might seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted
only because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination,
could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the
heart's corruption and weariness into a new existence.

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

The human spirit has not passed in historical times t