hrist was made
a ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay? Or
was Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divine
justice? The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature? And so
the scheme was worked out in all its details.

The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; the
creation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and the
exposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlasting
misery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which the
incarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; the
establishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal to
men the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer of
salvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacraments
which were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for the
submissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent or
rebellious,--this was the universe as it existed to the belief and
imagination of the Christian world for many centuries.

Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts of
the moral life,--in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man in
which Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world in
which Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought,--instead of such
study, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purely
fanciful interpretation of the universe. Its refined and ingenious
speculations were wasted upon a fantasy.

This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance. It
points to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus and
of Paul. And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, when
at a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed.

But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of the
human heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols.

The Catholic church was a second Roman empire in its extent and power,
and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire. For, judged by
what was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core,
human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at its
best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life. And that creed
which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus:
_Eternity bids you to goodness_. However much