hrough a more
critical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in
accepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?
Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any
absolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to
destroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three
centuries unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere,
not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a
reconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be
indirect, understanding mythical, happiness surreptitious; but all three
subsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary
disguises.

[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]

The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though
classic virtue and beauty and a great classic state subsisted, the force
that had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it
necessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal
apathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the
circumstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was
founded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the
kingdom of heaven--a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the
Jewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense to
mean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical
spirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had
made a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life
in time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism,
Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism
and action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It
even enshrined the two attitudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish
doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a
divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to
perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was
the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a
pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however,
would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and
weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it
would not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It
preferred an inconsistency, wh