make Christianity to
be a failure.

_XXIV. BREVIA: SHORT ESSAYS (IN CONNECTION WITH EACH OTHER.)_

1.--PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY--THE IDEAS OF DUTY AND HOLINESS.

The Pagan God could have perfect peace with his votary, and yet could
have no tendency to draw that votary to himself. Not so with the God of
Christianity, who cannot give His peace without drawing like a vortex to
Himself, who cannot draw into His own vortex without finding His peace
fulfilled.

'An age when lustre too intense.'--I am much mistaken if Mr. Wordsworth
is not deeply wrong here. Wrong he is beyond a doubt as to the _fact_;
for there could have been no virtual intensity of lustre (unless merely
as a tinsel toy) when it was contradicted by everything in the
_manners_, _habits_, and situations of the Pagan Gods--they who were
content to play in the coarsest manner the part of gay young bloods,
_sowing_ their wild oats, and with a recklessness of consequences to
their female partners never by possibility rivalled by men. I believe
and affirm that lustre the most dazzling and blinding would not have any
_ennobling_ effect except as received into a matrix of previous
unearthly and holy type.

As to Bacchus being eternally young, the ancients had no idea or power
to frame the idea of eternity. Their eternity was a limitary thing. And
this I say not empirically, but _a priori_, on the ground that without
the idea of holiness and unfleshliness, eternity cannot rise buoyant
from the ground, cannot sustain itself. But waive this, and what becomes
of the other things? If he were characteristically distinguished as
young, then, by a mere rebound of the logic, the others were not so
honoured, else where is the special privilege of Bacchus?

'And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth' (Hosea ii.
15).--The case of pathos, a person coming back to places, recalling the
days of youth after a long woe, is quite unknown to the ancients--nay,
the maternal affection itself, though used inevitably, is never
consciously reviewed as an object of beauty.

Duties arise everywhere, but--do not mistake--not under their sublime
form _as_ duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too
common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity,
since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive,
aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it
even arisen. It is the pressure of