nuteness. It is quite true, as the
modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a
matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.
Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less
intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most
primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole
man--intellect, habits, and affections--from the life of the world to
a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about
destiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,
the respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote
oneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and
preaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny
which justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the
world, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on
account of its wickedness, and that the ignorant, the poor, and the
down-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at
once on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and
would form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be
raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,
but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there
was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of
speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of
goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched
and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of
goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus
of circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly
as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could
bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and
diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice
of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the
interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a
cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was
Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled
with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a
special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye
fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as
of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything