What Is and What Might Be | Page 5

la Nature infinie,"--they would
at once unite their forces against him, and assail him with an even
bitterer hatred than that which animates them in their own intestine
strife.
The dualistic philosophy which satisfied the needs of the West for
some fifteen centuries was systematised and formulated for it, in the
language of myth and poetry, by an Eastern people. The acceptance of
official Christianity by the Graeco-Roman world was the result of
many causes, two of which stand out as central and supreme. The first
of these was the personal magnetism of Christ, in and through which
men came in contact with, and responded to, the attractive forces of
those moral and spiritual ideas which Christ set before his followers.
The second was the readiness of the Western mind to accept the
philosophy of Israel,--a philosophy with the master principles of which
it had long been subconsciously familiar, and for the clear and
convincing presentation of which it had long been waiting. Of the
personal magnetism of Christ and the part that it has played in the life
of Christendom, I need not now speak. My present concern is to show
how the philosophy of Israel--accepted nominally for Christ's sake, but
really for its own--has influenced the educational policy of the West.
In the Old Testament the Western mind found itself face to face with
the philosophical theories--theories about the world and its origin,
about Man and his destiny, about conduct and its consequences--to
which its own mythologies had given inadequate expression, but which
the poetical genius of a practical people was able to formulate to the
satisfaction of a practical world. In the philosophy of Israel "Nature"
was conceived of, not as animated by an indwelling life or soul, but as
the handiwork of an omnipotent God. In six days--so runs the
story--"God created the heavens and the earth." Whether by the word

which we translate as "days" were meant terrestrial days or cosmic ages
matters nothing, for in either case the broad fact remains that according
to the Biblical narrative the work of creation occupied a definite period
of time, and that on a certain day in the remote past the Creator rested
from his labours, surveyed his handiwork, and pronounced it to be very
good.
His next step was to stand aside from the world that he had made, leave
it to its own devices and see how it would behave itself in the person of
its lord and his viceroy,--Man. That the Creator should place Creation
on its trial and that it should speedily misbehave itself, may be said to
have been preordained. The idea of a Creator postulates the further idea
of a Fall. The finished work of an omnipotent Creator is presumably
good,--good in this sense, if in no other, that its actualities must needs
determine the creature's ideals and standards of good. But the world, as
Man knows it, seems to be deeply tainted with evil. How is this
anomaly to be accounted for? The story of the Fall is the answer to this
question. Whether modern theology regards the story of the Fall as
literally or only as symbolically true, I cannot say for certain. The
question is of minor importance. What is of supreme importance is that
Christian theology accepts and has always accepted the consequences
of the idea of the Fall, and that in formulating those consequences it
has provided the popular thought of the West with conceptions by
which its whole outlook on life has been, and is still, determined and
controlled.
The idea of the Fall, as dramatised by Israel and interpreted by the
"Doctors" of the West, gives adequate expression--on the highest level
of his thinking--to the crude dualism which constitutes the philosophy
of the average man. Hence the immense attractiveness of the idea to the
practical races of the West,--to peoples whose chief idea is to get their
mental problems solved for them as speedily, as authoritatively, and as
intelligibly as possible, that they may thus be free to devote themselves
to "business," to the tangible affairs of life.
Let us follow the philosophy of the Fall into some of its more obvious
consequences. The Universe (to use the most comprehensive of all

terms) is conceived of as divided into two dissevered worlds,--the
world of Nature, which is fallen, ruined, and accursed, and the
Supernatural world, which shares in the perfection and centres in the
glory of God. Between these two worlds intercourse is, in the nature of
things, impossible. But Man is not content that his state of godless
isolation should endure for ever. As a thinker, he has exiled God from
Nature and therefore from his own daily life. But, as a "living soul," he
craves for reunion with God; and so long as the