THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 241 



swallowing and ejecting Jonah, the immaculate con- 

 ception, the water turned to wine, the fig-tree withered 

 by a curse — and they will reason like children ; or, in 

 other words, they will not reason at all : they will 

 merely repeat what they have been taught by their 

 mammas. But when they discourse to the savage 

 concerning his belief, they use the logic of Voltaire, 

 and deride witches and men possessed in a style 

 which Jesus and the twelve apostles, the Fathers of 

 the church, the popes of the Middle Ages, and Martin 

 Luther himself, would have accounted blasphemous 

 and contrary to Scripture. Now it is impossible to 

 persuade an adult savage that his gods do not exist ; 

 and he considers those who deny their existence to be 

 ignorant foreigners, unacquainted with the divine con- 

 stitution of his country. Hence he laughs in his 

 sleeve at all that the missionaries say. But the 

 primitive Christians believed in gods and goddesses, 

 satyrs and nymphs, as implicitly as the pagans them- 

 selves. They did not deny, and they did not dis- 

 believe, the miracles performed in pagan temples. 

 They allowed that the gods had great power upon 

 earth, but asserted that they would have it only for a 

 time ; that it ceased beyond the grave ; that they 

 were rebels; and that God was the rightful king. 

 Here, then, were two classes of men whose intellects 

 were precisely on the same level. Each had a theory, 

 and the Christian theory was the better of the two. 

 It had definite promises and threats ; and without 

 being too high for the vulgar comprehension, it re- 

 duced the scheme of the universe to order and har- 

 mony, resembling that of the great empire under which 

 they lived. 



But to the philosophers of that period it was merely 

 Q 



