SECULAR LIFE AND RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 447 



could not endure him, because he found so much religion where they 

 found none, and because he found so little where they found all. 



Paul, sharing at first to the full the prejudices of a Pharisee, yet 

 came to conceive as the very marrow of Christianity this, its univer- 

 sal intent, its all-embracing quality, its conciliatory attitude. The 

 earliest church never wearied of repeating how Greeks and bar- 

 barians, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freemen, sinners of deepest 

 dye and seekers after God of every sort, all found in the spirit of 

 Jesus a new bond of cohesion, and in this new enthusiasm for human- 

 ity the common ground for all who in any way were trying to be 

 good. The secretly cherished ideals of men were greeted with joy 

 by their brethren. The good was everywhere recognized and appro- 

 priated. Men in whom differences of race, of custom and of occu- 

 pation, of intellectual training and horizon, had bred an alienation 

 which seemed almost like a law of nature, knelt at the same devotions, 

 listened together to the reminiscences of the simple life of Jesus, 

 and partook of a common meal in token of their brotherhood. 



But everybody knows how soon the Christian body lost this, its 

 original projection. Every one knows how soon the sense began to 

 fade, that the Church had been sent forth into the world to seek 

 out in faith, to embrace in love, and to appropriate with joy anything 

 that anywhere was good; to brood over all things in hope; to pro- 

 claim to every man the divine expectancy and trust, to recognize as 

 the children of God even those who did not at all recognize them- 

 selves as such, and to assert as the service of God the lives and works 

 of many men who might have feared or even scorned to say of them- 

 selves that they served God. 



The simple brotherhood gradually became the most complex and 

 dictatorial organization. This organization set itself about the most 

 elaborate and positive definitions of what was true and good, and 

 the exclusion of all those who could not agree with those defini- 

 tions. It put forth a form of dogma as the infallible statement 

 of the pure revelation of God, not realizing how much of the philo- 

 sophy and science of the age and of the religious experience of 

 the race had been taken up into that statement. It established a 

 form of worship which alone was to be accredited. It preached an 

 ideal of life which was often alien to the natural life of men, hostile 

 to culture, and inimical to civilization. It denounced nature for 

 the sake of that which it called grace. It set the church against the 

 world. It sharply distinguished things sacred from things secular. 

 It put the power of the interpretation of things divine in the hands 

 of a single class of men, instead of appealing to every man's reason 

 and conscience in the sight of God. 



In doing all this the Christians indeed only followed an impulse 

 which may be illustrated from the history of almost every other 



