had flowered luxuriantly in æsthetic fancies, while the spiritual life
of Judaism languished amid strict obedience to forms and precepts. The
far-reaching thoughts of Greek philosophers and the lofty ethics of
Hebrew preachers were divorced from the primitive ghost-world, even as
the mental processes of the modern scholar are separated by a great gulf
from those of the woman who comes to scrub the floor. The advent of
Christianity fused together the various elements. The doctrine of a
future life was endowed with all the moral significance that Jewish
thought could give to it, and with all the mystic glory that Hellenic
speculation could contribute, so that the effect upon men was that of a
fresh revelation of life and immortality through the gospel. Grotesque
and hideous features also were brought in from the ghost-worlds of the
classic ages, as well as from that of the Teutonic barbarians, and the
result is seen in mediæval Christianity. At no other time, perhaps, has
the Unseen World played such a leading part in men's minds as in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our Christian era, in the age that
witnessed the culmination of sublimity in church architecture, in the
society whose thought found comprehensive expression in the "Summa" of
St. Thomas, as the thought of our times is expressed in Spencer's "First
Principles," in an intellectual atmosphere, which just as it was about
passing away was depicted for all coming time in the poem of Dante. It
was a time of spiritual awakening such as mankind had never before
witnessed, but it was also an age of new problems, an age wherein the
seeds of revolt were thickly germinating. The nature and constitution of
the Unseen World had been too rashly and too elaborately set forth in
theorems born of the slender knowledge of primitive times, and the
growing tendency to interrogate Nature soon led to conclusions which
broke down the old edifice of thought. In the sixteenth century came
Copernicus and administered such a shock to the mind as even Luther's
defiance of the papacy scarcely equalled. In recent days, when Bishop
Wilberforce reckoned without his host in trying to twit Huxley with his
monkey ancestry, our minds were getting inured to all sorts of audacious
innovations, so that they did not greatly disturb us. For its unsettling
effects upon time-honoured beliefs and mental habits the Darwinian
theory is no more to be compared to the Copernican than the invention of
the steamboat is to be compared to the voyages of Columbus. We are in no
danger of overrating the bewilderment that was wrought by the discovery
that our earth is not the physical centre of things, and that the sun
apparently does not exist for the sole purpose of giving light and
warmth to man's terrestrial habitat. We need not wonder that in
conservative Spain scarcely a century ago the University of Salamanca
prohibited the teaching of the Newtonian astronomy. We need not wonder
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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