Now the warfare that Rousseau and the individualists of feeling have waged on the general sense has meant in practice a warfare on two great traditions, the classical and the Christian. I have already pointed out that these two traditions, though both holding the idea of imitation, were not entirely in accord with one another, that the imitation of Horace differs widely from the imitation of Christ. Yet their diverging from one another is as nothing compared with their divergence from the individualism of the primitivist. For the man who imitates Christ in any traditional sense this world is not an Arcadian dream but a place of trial and probation. “Take up your cross and follow me.” The following of this great exemplar required that the instinctive self, which Rousseau would indulge, should be either sternly rebuked or else mortified utterly. So far from Nature and God being one, the natural man is so corrupt, according to the more austere Christian, that the gap between him and the divine can be traversed only by a miracle of grace. He should therefore live in fear and trembling as befits a being upon whom rests the weight of the divine displeasure. “It is an humble thing to be a man.” Humility indeed is, in the phrase of Jeremy Taylor, the special ornament and jewel of the Christian religion, and one is tempted to add, of all religion in so far as it is genuine. Genuine religion must always have in some form the sense of a deep inner cleft between man’s ordinary self and the divine. But some Christians were more inclined from the start, as we can see in the extreme forms of the doctrine of grace, to push their humility to an utter despair of human nature. The historical explanation of this despair is obvious: it is a sharp rebound from the pagan riot; an excessive immersion in this world led to an excess of otherworldliness. At the same time the conviction as to man’s helplessness was instilled into those, who, like St. Augustine, had witnessed in some of its phases the slow disintegration of the Roman Empire. Human nature had gone bankrupt; and for centuries it needed to be administered, if I may continue the metaphor, in receivership. The doctrine of grace was admirably adapted to this end.