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to Literalism, that under its guidance the steady march along the moral path was continued. Its light was sufficient to show the moral region in clear distinctness from Nature. This was what was wanted for the achievement of the early Christians. Their achievement was one not of searching study, but of practical triumph. Just seeing Morality, they began an exercise of human faculty such as had never been known before.

They separated themselves from all the ways of the world. They lived in continuous appeal to the Fountain of purity. They in many cases denied themselves every manner of direct pleasure. And when misunderstood and subjected to shame and suffering, they remembered their Master, still praised God, and walked with a strange happiness even into the jaws of death. So, in the power of Jesus, they magnified our common being.

We know that much of the activity of the early Church was not beyond criticism even as moral activity. Their moral action was so placed in opposition to Nature that it became in many respects morbid, and also failed to affect the lives of many who might have been influenced by more genial guidance. The purity of motive, however, which prevailed generally, at least in the first few genera

tions, is well assured to us.

Genuine moral effort

spread from one to another. And this is the point of importance. Persistently the Church held on, amidst a carnival of demons which grew up out of the abuse of liberty permitted in a great empire, till in time it became the strongest power in the world. And though it was still to run a course of much error, much negligence, and even much lapse into moral lethargy, it had accomplished its marvellous work. Human life had received a new set. It would never again quite cease to move along the path which leads to the true Source of its welfare.

CHAPTER X.

A CHRISTIAN GUIDANCE THAT IS NOT LITERALISTIC.

LITERALISM up to the present century has never been formally repudiated by any large section of Christendom. From the second century to the nineteenth, it has enjoyed a remarkable dominion. Up to the threshold of our time, Catholics and Protestants have been practically at one in leaving it unquestioned.

Another light, however, superseded it in real usage during the early Christian ages; and that other still prevails among those who are in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. That light is Church-guidance. It is what the early Protestants called Popery. It is akin to Literalism through its main constituents. But it has also in its composition a very important fresh element. The fresh element is a certain adaptation which Protestants regard as human in character. Keeping to the imagery which is presupposed in this sketch,

one may say that the light of Literalism was made to pass through a film of particular interpretation and variation, and that by this means it was transformed into the Catholic Church Guidance.

From this second guiding agency a large part of Christendom afterwards turned away entirely. And for the revulsion real grounds existed. The strongest of these were on the practical side. There is no call for us here to inquire into the moral soundness of such actions as may have been the results of the Catholic guidance. It is enough to look at the guiding principle itself. It was reasonable that the mind should protest against being guided in practical details by pronouncements which the common understanding regarded as human. On the side of theory also, real grounds for the rebellion were not wanting. So many new assertions were made under the leading, of a kind that disagreed with ordinary experience, that reason was threatened with complete confusion as to what was real and what was not. But on the side of theory there was also a fact of an opposite character, which was neglected by the earlier Protestants. This was a softening influence for those harsh appearances which Literalism had declared to be real. Some notice has been taken of this above. The most important example of it is

found in the hope which arose early in Church history, that the merely ordinary wicked man might have before him only a purgatory, from which there would be an escape.1

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was, on the side of practice, a demand that no human determinant should any longer intervene between man and his conscience.

On the side of theory, the Protestant Reformation had two aspects.

It was in one view the revival of the bareness and pitilessness of the letter. Like some violent assailant upon the anesthetics of modern medical treatment, demanding that in future the pain be felt in all its racking power, so Calvin and our own Knox sternly returned to the method of Augustine, so as to outdo that earlier reasoner, and argued all points from the letter of the Bible with merciless logic.2 In this aspect, Protestantism was not a step forwards. If the sense of God leads away from some of the teaching given by the Church of Rome, it not less completely makes us revolt against such an utterance as this: "Let it stand, therefore, as an 1 Augustine, Civ. Dei, xx. 25.

2 For Knox, see Interview with Queen Mary, in M'Crie's Life of Knox, Period VI. "You interpret the Scriptures in one way," said the queen, etc. Calvin, Institutes, I., vi. 3.

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