powers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern
Rome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human action
were still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed,
it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in
which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not
destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:
it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only
a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is
the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has
not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a
new and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbing
effect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms have
been cured and the disease driven in.

[Sidenote: Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural
world.]

The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle
subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and
spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,
however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in
Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to
reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,
future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be
shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an
ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural
grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished