Christianity originally and generically at once awoke and satisfied a
spiritual craving for a higher, purer, less torn and fragmentary being,
than is permitted to sons of men on the troubled and corrupt earth. It
disclosed to them a gracious, benevolent, and all-powerful being, who
would one day redress all wrongs and recompense all pain, and who asked
no more from them meanwhile than that they should prove their love of
him whom they had not seen, by love of their brothers whom they had
seen. Its great glory was to have raised the moral dignity and
self-respect of the many to a level which had hitherto been reached only
by a few. Calvin, again, like some stern and austere step-son of the
Christian God, jealous of the divine benignity and abused
open-handedness of his father’s house, with word of merciless power set
free all those souls that were more anxious to look the tremendous facts
of necessity and evil and punishment full in the face, than to reconcile
them with any theory of the infinite mercy and loving-kindness of a
supreme creator. Men who had been enervated or helplessly perplexed by a
creed that had sunk into ignoble optimism and self-indulgence, became
conscious of new fibre in their moral structure, when they realised life
as a long wrestling with unseen and invincible forces of grace,
election, and fore-destiny, the agencies of a being whose ways and
dealings, whose contradictory attributes of unjust justice and loving
vindictiveness, it was not for man, who is a worm and the son of a worm,
to reconcile with the puny logic of human words, or the shallow
consistency of human ideas. Catholicism was a movement of mysticism, and
so in darker regions was the Calvinism which in so many important
societies displaced it. Each did much to raise the measure of worth and
purify the spiritual self-respect of mankind, and each also discouraged
and depressed the liberal play of intelligence, the cheerful energizing
of reason, the bright and many-sided workings of fancy and imagination.
Human nature, happily for us, ever presses against this system or that,
and forces ways of escape for itself into freedom and light. The
scientific reason urgently seeks instruments and a voice; the creative
imagination unconsciously takes form to itself in manifold ways, of all
of which the emotions can give good account to the understanding. Hence
the glorious suffusion of light which the ardent desire of men brought
over the face of Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
Before Luther and Calvin in their separate ways brought into splendid
prominence their new ideas of moral order, more than two generations of
men had almost ceased to care whether there be any moral order or not,
and had plunged with the delight of enchantment among ideas of grace and
beauty, whose forms were old on the earth, but which were full of
seemingly inexhaustible novelty and freshness to men, who had once