GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS



ON CHRISTIANITY, AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT.

[1846.]

FORCES, which are illimitable in their compass of effect, are often,
for the same reason, obscure and untraceable in the steps of their
movement. Growth, for instance, animal or vegetable, what eye can
arrest its eternal increments? The hour-hand of a watch, who can
detect the separate fluxions of its advance? Judging by the past,
and the change which is registered between that and the present, we
know that it must be awake; judging by the immediate appearances,
we should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, again, that
works without holiday for ever, and searches every corner of the
universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet,
shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions of
sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps
of Christianity amongst the political workings of man. Nothing,
that the heart of man values, is so secret; nothing is so potent.

It is _because_ Christianity works so secretly, that it works
so potently; it is _because_ Christianity burrows and hides
itself, that it towers above the clouds; and hence partly it is
that its working comes to be misapprehended, or even lost out of
sight. It is dark to eyes touched with the films of human frailty:
but it is 'dark with excessive bright.'[Footnote: 'Dark with
excessive bright.' _Paradise Lost_. Book III.] Hence it has