tself
of the character of Christ. The ideal of asceticism represents moral
effort as essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human
nature to another, that it may live the more completely in what
survives of it; while the ideal of culture represents it as a
harmonious development of all the parts of human nature, in just
proportion to each other. It was to the latter order of ideas that the
church, and especially the church of Rome in the age of the Antonines,
freely lent herself. In that earlier "Peace" she had set up for
herself the ideal of spiritual development, under the guidance of an
instinct by which, in those serene moments, she was absolutely true to
the peaceful soul of her Founder. "Goodwill to men," she said, "in
whom God Himself is well-pleased!" For a little while, at least, there
was no forced opposition between the soul and the body, the world and
the spirit, and the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently with
the people of Christ. Tact, good sense, ever the note of a true
orthodoxy, the merciful compromises of the church, indicative of her
imperial vocation in regard to all the varieties of human kind, with a
universality of which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding is
but a prototype, was already become conspicuous, in spite of a
discredited, irritating, vindictive society, all around her.

Against that divine urbanity and moderation [122] the old error of
Montanus we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt--sour, falsely
anti-mundane, ever with an air of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted
distaste in particular for all the peculiar graces of womanhood. By it
the desire to please was understood to come of the author of evil. In
this interval of quietness, it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of
reaction, that some such extravagances of the religious temper should
arise. But again the church of Rome, now becoming every day more and
more completely the capital of the Christian world, checked the nascent
Montanism, or puritanism of the moment, vindicating for all Christian
people a cheerful liberty of heart, against many a narrow group of
sectaries, all alike, in their different ways, accusers of the genial
creation of God. With her full, fresh faith in the Evangele--in a
veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the dignity of
man's entire personal being--for a season, at least, at that critical
period in the development of Christianity, she was for reaso