d, as well as the
intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that
represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining
salvation by slavish submission.

The reason for this revolt lay in the gradual descent of Christian
teaching into so-called simplicity, so that the most ignorant might be
able to grasp it. Protestant religionists asserted loudly that nothing
ought to be preached save that which every one could grasp, that the
glory of the Gospel lay in its simplicity, and that the child and the
unlearned ought to be able to understand and apply it to life. True
enough, if by this it were meant that there are some religious truths
that all can grasp, and that a religion fails if it leaves the lowest,
the most ignorant, the most dull, outside the pale of its elevating
influence. But false, utterly false, if by this it be meant that
religion has no truths that the ignorant cannot understand, that it is
so poor and limited a thing that it has nothing to teach which is above
the thought of the unintelligent or above the moral purview of the
degraded. False, fatally false, if such be the meaning; for as that view
spreads, occupying the pulpits and being sounded in the churches, many
noble men and women, whose hearts are half-broken as they sever the
links that bind them to their early faith, withdraw from the churches,
and leave their places to be filled by the hypocritical and the
ignorant. They pass either into a state of passive agnosticism, or--if
they be young and enthusiastic--into a condition of active aggression,
not believing that that can be the highest which outrages alike
intellect and conscience, and preferring the honesty of open unbelief to
the drugging of the intellect and the conscience at the bidding of an
authority in which they recognise nothing that is divine.

In thus studying the thought of our time we see that the question of a
hidden teaching in connection with Christianity becomes of vital
importance. Is Christianity to survive as _the_ religion of the West? Is
it to live through the centuries of the future, and to continue to play
a part in moulding the thought of the evolving western races? If it is
to live, it must regain the knowledge it has lost, and again have its
mystic and its occult teachings; it must again stand forth as an
authoritative teacher of spiritual verities, clothed with the only
authority worth anything, the authority of knowledge. If these