The Theological Method. 259 



It is easy to see that the relation of Religion to Society, 

 in its primeval and pre-Christian form, was mixed of various 

 yarn, good and ill together. The "cake of custom" which 

 it furnished was a necessity of the social situation. That 

 or no society at all. But it paid dear for its whistle. It 

 was miserably artificial while it held its own. It entailed 

 a miserable inheritance of legal and moral fictions on the 

 emancipated Greek and Roman world. That History never 

 repeats itself is a proverbial phrase. It is as true as our 

 proverbial wisdom generally is, and that is something less 

 than half. History never repeats itself exactly. It is 

 always repeating itself in a large and general way. The 

 immense disintegration which succeeded the downfall of 

 the Roman Empire through its inherent weakness and the 

 onset of the Barbarians was not unlike tlie original social 

 chaos. It needed quite as much a formative principle ; 

 quite as much a new cake of custom. Christianity, ecclesi- 

 astical Christianity, responded to the reed. It was the 

 savior of society. For centuries its splendid domination 

 secured a social order hardly if any less religious than the 

 society and State determined by the family religion of the 

 ancient world. For every part of life, domestic, personal, 

 industrial, political, intellectual, aesthetic, there Avas a re- 

 ligious rule. The rule was often monstrous and absurd. 

 No matter ; all the same it held the fort till reinforcements 

 could come up, the intellectual and political forces of the 

 modern world. And as under the old regime there was a 

 miserable inheritance from the Religion of the Hearth, so 

 have we had a miserable inheritance from the Christianity 

 which saved society in the Middle Ages, an inheritance of 

 theological morality a morality looking not to human 

 benefit but to the imagined will or preference of God for 

 the sanctions of the moral life. Theological morality in 

 its palmiest days endeavored, and for the most part success- 

 fully, to elevate the importance of performing certain 

 ceremonies and of believing certain doctrines into superi- 

 ority to any actions between man and man. But human 

 nature is so constituted that, although men may easily 

 persuade themselves that intellectual error, or sacramental 

 irregularity, is the most damnable of crimes, "the voice of 

 conscience protests so strongly against this doctrine that 

 it can only be silenced by the persuasion that the jiersonal 

 character of the heretic (or delinquent) is as repulsive as 



