MEDITATIONS AND CEITICISMS 211 



sweetness, their solemnity, their mysticism, and their 

 aroma of the sacred and divine are almost irresist- 

 ible. Only very strong minds or else very dull 

 ones can withstand them. A spell is put upon the 

 mind of the reader, and his logical faculties forget 

 to assert themselves. It seems as if these things 

 must have happened just as the Gospel writers put 

 them down, — as if the whole order of the world, and 

 the whole relation of man to it, and of God to man, 

 must have been entirely dififerent in those days from 

 what it is now. It is a glimpse into the land of 

 poetry and fable. We escape from the tyranny of 

 nature, from the grossness and irreligion of the actual 

 world, into a realm where all is plastic and beautiful 

 and satisfying. Then the power of Christianity to 

 inspire beautiful and disinterested lives — is it not 

 an old story, do we not know it well ? It does not 

 offer a system of philosophy, but a religious incen- 

 tive. 



When it attempts to play the r61e of interpreter 

 of the visible order of the universe, its failure is pa- 

 thetic ; its proofs are childish ; its science is essen- 

 tially pagan ; its story of the Fall as an explanation 

 of the origin of evil, and its " plan of salvation " as 

 a means of escape from this evil, as science does not 

 rise above any of the pagan conceptions of the ra- 

 tionale of things. 



