The Chief End of Man | Page 6

an atmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy
was childish, there was wrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and
its accompaniments,--a literal transformation of the bread and wine of
the sacrament into the body and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a
saving grace. The power to work this miracle was the supreme weapon
of the priesthood.
We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three
figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas à Kempis. À Kempis
shows religion fled from the active world with its strifes and
temptations, sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue;
feeding on the contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal
horrors; self-centred and inglorious. The opposite type is Frances, a
joyful prophet of glad tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic;
touched with the beauty of nature and the appeal of the animal creation;
exalting simplicity and poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the
needy and sorrowful like Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual
originality like Jesus, no power to create a new religion; strong only to
revive the best elements of the traditional faith, and to organize a
society which erelong sank back to the general level of the church.
Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and
intense phase. He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in
his tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for
the highest. This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and
satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence
the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and
for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation. Dante
shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has

something further. The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the
inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and
tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link
between the seen and unseen worlds. Thus at the heart of the old
supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love
sanctified by death becomes the revealer.
In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and
future world has reached its furthest limit. The mind of man must needs
revert to some nearer home and sphere. And closely following Dante
we see in England a group of figures who betoken the return. There is
Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly
life. There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal,
the hardship and woe of the poor. Wyclif insists on a personal religion,
whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social
wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre
of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation. A little earlier we
see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental
philosophy which had been slighted for centuries. These four are the
precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of
the elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.
As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by
early Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval
Catholicism, so another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day.
The leading features of this last transition may be summarily sketched,
we may then glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance
in its successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the
present.
The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect
marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual
freedom; and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural
of a natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and
warring universe, a harmonious universe.
In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way
of thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge.

Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of
the actual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and the
spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as
slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval.
With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new
forms of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer
humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the
study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the
sublimity and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon
the powers and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient
guides; a rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and
hope which were once supposed inseparably bound up with