t abstract
form, could not include, and therefore necessarily became opposed to,
the forms of social life and organization with which it came into
contact. But while the early Christians looked for the realization of
the kingdom of Heaven in some immediate earthly future, and the Middle
Age postponed it to another life, Christ had already taught the truth,
which alone can turn either of these hopes into something more than the
expression of an egoistic desire--the truth that "the kingdom of God is
within us." The reaction of the social necessities of mediaeval society
on the doctrine--which Comte quite correctly describes as leading to the
gradual elevation of humanity and of human interests--found its main
support in the principles of the doctrine itself, so soon as its lessons
had been absorbed into the mind of the people. The irresistible force of
the movement, whereby the intelligence was emancipated from authority,
and the claims of the family and the State were asserted against the
Church, lay above all in this, that Christianity itself was felt to
involve the consecration of human life in all its interests and
relations. Luther's appeal to the New Testament and to the earliest ages
of Christianity was in some ways unhistorical, but it expressed a truth.
Protestantism was not a return to the Christianity of the first century;
it was an assertion of the relation of the individual to God, which was
itself made possible only by the long work of Latin Catholicism. But the
development of a doctrine, if it has in it any germ of truth which is
capable of development, involves a continual recurrence to its first,
and therefore its most general, expression. The elements successively
developed in the Catholic and the Protestant, the Latin and the Germanic
forms of Christianity, were both present in the original germ, and the
exaggerated prominence given in the former to the _negative_ side of
Christianity could not but lead, in the development of thought, to a
similarly exaggerated manifestation of its _positive_ side. But it is
nearly as absurd to say, as Comte does, that the true logical outcome of
Christianity is to be found in the "life of the hermits of the Thebaid,"
as it would be to say that its true logical outcome is to be found in
those vehement assertions of nature--naked and unashamed--as its own
sufficient warrant, which poured almost with the force of inspiration
from the lips of Diderot. Both extremes are equal