sion was the Christian key
to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the
still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of
modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The
average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was
content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were
many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would
see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air;
but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and
rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the
compromise between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of Matthew
Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.
This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;
you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this
mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it
clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility)
make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It
does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if
she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of
being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this
same strange expedient to save both of them.

It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way
Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he
was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I
am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am _a_ man I am the chief of
sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man
taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny--all that was to go. We
were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no
pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only
the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God
walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man
was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had
spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was
to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a
thought of the dignity of man that could only be e