The Chief End of Man | Page 5

bodily
resurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, and
unbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness. That
Jesus was risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new
society which grew up around his grave. His moral precepts, his
parables, his acts, his personality,--the personality of one who was alike
the child of God and the friend of sinners,--these were enshrined in a
new mythology. A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into
factions; then blending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to
an invisible leader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into
more remote expectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a
present spiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization,
priesthood, ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of
people of the new religion, and a corresponding depreciation of its
quality,--this was the early stage of Christianity. It vanquished and
destroyed the Greek-Roman mythology, already half dead. Philosophy
strove with it in vain,--there was no real meeting-ground between the
two systems. The final appeal of the Stoic was to reason. The Christian
theologians thought they reasoned, but their argumentation was feeble
save at one point. But that was the vital point,--experience. Christianity,
in its mixture of ardor, credulity, and morality had somehow a power to
give to common men and women a nobility and gladness of living
which Stoicism could not inspire in them. So it was the worthier of the
two antagonists that triumphed in the strife.
Ideally, there ought to have been no strife. Christianity and ethical
philosophy ought to have worked side by side, until the religion of
Reason and the religion of Love understood each other and blended in
one. Destined they were to blend, but not for thousands of years. The
new religion brooked no rivalry and no rebellion. It swayed the world
despotically, but the beginning and secret of its power was that it had
captured the world's heart. Its best watchwords were Faith, Hope, Love.
In a word, civilized mankind, having outgrown the earlier
nature-worship, and having found the philosophic reason inadequate to
provide a satisfying way of life, accepted a new mythology, because it

was inspired by ideas which were powerful to guide, to inspire, and to
console. For many centuries we shall look in vain for any serious study
of human life except in conformity to the Christian mythology.
The Roman world was submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes.
There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; a
subversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effete civilization;
a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance. The
marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years,
through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval
society, cannot even be summarized in these brief paragraphs. The
point on which our theme requires attention is that the religion of this
period had its form and substance in the Catholic church; and of this
church the twin aspects were an authoritative government administered
by popes, councils, bishops, and priests, and a conception of the
supernatural world equally definite and authoritative, which dominated
the intellects and imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and
Heaven. The visible church and the invisible world of which the church
held the interpretation and the key,--this concrete fact, and this faith the
counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion of
Europe for many centuries.
We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaeval
religion. It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded the
unquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon the
whole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency,
the highest moral and spiritual ideals men knew.
Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of all
intellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and the
feudal society which followed. Even before those events the human
intellect seemed to flag. The old classicism and the new Christianity
never so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a great
intellectual movement. In the Dark Ages which followed, learning
shrank into the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost
ceased as a creative force. For almost a thousand years--from
Augustine to Dante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high

intrinsic value for our time. When intellectual energy woke again in
Italy and then in the North, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought
itself in human thought.
Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate
ceremonial, appealing through the senses to the imagination and the
spiritual sense. For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the
symbol with the substance of religion. In an age when the highest
minds lived in