People read their histories so differently. The pagan doubt, the Christian revelation and belief, the conversion of the pagan world to Christianity, the Renaissance, in which the conversion was in a sense reversed, and the Reformation mean such different things to different people. Some must still have it that paganism, or pre-Christianism, ended in absolutely blind despair, in the avowal of complete failure--as if such despair or failure could ever find words for its own utterance; that Christianity came into a hopelessly pagan world wholly from without, came into a world of nothing but unmixed doubt, and brought with it nothing but unmixed belief; that the conversion was a sort of conquest, by a power all its own capturing the pagans, so wholly unnerved as to be quite incapable even of a futile resistance; that the Renaissance, restoration as it was of the pagan life and thought, was at best a great condescension on the part of Christendom and at worst an unfortunate return to the pagan idols; and that in the Reformation the Christian Religion Militant did but retreat upon the Bible as its impregnable fortress. But such history can hardly be our history here. For us the rise and the progress of Christianity have had quite a different character. To strike at the foundation of that whole structure the pagan doubting was too articulate. It was, also, too earnest. It was too genuine. The races did indeed resign, as with [p.267] an investor's recklessness, all that they had, but their recklessness was not unmixed. Their doubting had hope in it as well as despair. It still loved the spirit of what had been even when it betrayed the letter. It had its martyrs, too, as well as its suicides; its sense of life as well as its enervating fear of death. Say what you will, then, a great, warm, yearning belief dwelt within it. And so, just because the pagan doubting was too earnest and too genuine and too articulate, because it was, in truth, a great sacrificial offering, the crucifixion on Calvary was also too true to life at Athens and Alexandria, as well as to life at Jerusalem, and the resurrection of the spirit was too true to life at Rome; they were too true to mean anything but fulfilment and achievement. Everywhere, in every place and in every department of life, the letter had been rejected; but everywhere also--and this, nothing else, was the true conversion to Christianity--the spirit was accepted. Acceptance of the spirit, too, meant that in good time the letter would be restored, as indeed at the Renaissance it surely was.