ou hast promised to give to thy
obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith
venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of
us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for
nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to
His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than
this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and
themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great
fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the
Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of
an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no
more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of
righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not
enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had
suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His
sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a
life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in
life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or
language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love
is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his
mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.

How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know
it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for
itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the
solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith.
Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the
seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
polity.

But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,
which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether
forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material
things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same
law; that it is merely generalised experience;