supernatural was like a dim and diffused light, brighter in some places,
and darker in others, but focalised and concentrated nowhere.
Christianity has focalised it, united into one the scattered points of
brightness, and collected other rays that were before altogether
imperceptible. That vague '_idea of the good_,' of which Plato said most
men dimly augured the existence, but could not express their augury, has
been given a definite shape to by Christianity in the form of its Deity.
That Deity, from an external point of view, may be said to have acquired
His sovereignty as did the Roman Cæsar. He absorbed into His own person
the offices of all the gods that were before him, as the Roman Cæsar
absorbed all the offices of the state; and in His case also, as has been
said of the Roman Cæsar, the whole was immeasurably greater than the
mere sum of the parts. Scientifically and philosophically He became the
first cause of the world; He became the father of the human soul, and
its judge; and what is more, its rest and its delight, and its desire.
Under the light of this conception, man appeared an ampler being. His
thoughts were for ever being gazed on by the great controller of all
things; he was made in the likeness of the Lord of lords; he was of kin
to the power before which all the visible world trembled; and every
detail in the life of a human soul became vaster, beyond all comparison,
than the depths of space and time. But not only did the sense of man's
dignity thus develop, and become definite. The accompanying sense of his
degradation became intenser and more definite also. The gloom of a sense
of sin is to be found in Æschylus, but this gloom was vague and
formless. Christianity gave to it both depth and form; only the despair
that might have been produced in this way was now softened by hope.
Christianity has, in fact, declared clearly a supernatural of which men
before were more or less ignorantly conscious. The declaration may or
may not have been a complete one, but at any rate it is the completest
that the world has yet known. And the practical result is this: when we,