e beyond
the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered
in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense
which human thought or language can attach to the
words; as little like it as the crown of love is like it,
which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains
his mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose
themselves in Him.

How all this nobleness ebbed away, and Christianity
became what we know it, we are partially beginning to
see. The living spirit organized for itself a body of
perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses current at the
day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became
formulae and articles of faith; again, as before, the living
and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of
decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
polity. But there was another cause allied to this, and
yet different from it, which, though a law of human
nature itself, seems now-a-days altogether forgotten. In
the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of
material things, we are apt to believe that all our
knowledge follows the same law, that it is merely generalized
experience, that experience accumulates daily, and,
therefore, that "progress of the species," in all senses, is an
obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
is true in this view mixed with a great deal which is
false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical
sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment
to experiment, and each advance is secured and
made good, and cannot again be lost; one generation
takes up the general sum of experience where the last
laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of
adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The
successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing
for the apprehension of them but an understanding
ordinarily cultivated. Prejudices have to be encountered,
but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of
conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
beset our progress in the science of morality, Here we
enter upon conditions wholly different, conditions in
which age differs from age, man differs from man, and
even from himself, at different moments. We all have
experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level;
some, when we are lifted above it, and put on, as it were,
a higher nature. At such interv