One can scarcely pass by a leap of thought from the age of Paul to the age of Dante without an instant's glance at the intervening tract. There are the early Christian communities, bound together by tender ties of brotherhood; storms of persecution fanning high the flame of courage and faith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself like the coming of the dawn. There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking shape in fantastic heresies. There is the degeneracy of a faith held in pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion. There are enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen" emperors like Trajan and Aurelius. There is the peace of the Empire in its best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content. There are incursions of barbarians--the strange, little-known life of nomadic tribes--with pristine virtues of valor and chastity, half-pictured, half-imagined, by Tacitus. There is conquest, rapine, subjugation, suffering. There are ages in which violence is master, and in the disordered struggle of the violent among themselves the weak are trampled under foot. There are scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen by the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions and mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed with cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows, achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints. There are civilizers in state and church,--Alfred, Charlemagne, Hildebrand. There is the emergence of a social and ecclesiastical order; the ranking of kings, barons, and vassals; of priests, bishops, and popes; the establishment of laws and charters; the growth of liturgies and cathedrals. The contrast is great between the simplicity of a high moral ideal, like that of Jesus or Paul, which claims, and with such show of reason and right, the whole allegiance of man, and the vast complexity of good and evil in which the ideal works only as one obscure and partial element. How simple, how clear, how sweetly inviting sounds the call,--how strange and discordant the response! That inconsistency was explained by the church fathers, like Augustine, as due to the inherent badness of human nature. That universal badness flowed from one sin of the common ancestor. That sin was induced by the machinations of Satan, arch-enemy of God, and practically dividing the rule of the universe with him. A logical and symmetrical explanation in its day, but it no longer explains.