But
the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men
and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and
wine--the true grace he drove out into the wilderness--high up, it may
be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her
in her ill report.
It is common to hear men wonder what new faith will be adopted by mankind
if disbelief in the Christian religion should become general. They seem
to expect that some new theological or quasi-theological system will
arise, which, _mutatis mutandis_, shall be Christianity over again. It
is a frequent reproach against those who maintain that the supernatural
element of Christianity is without foundation, that they bring forward no
such system of their own. They pull down but cannot build. We sometimes
hear even those who have come to the same conclusions as the destroyers
say, that having nothing new to set up, they will not attack the old. But
how can people set up a new superstition, knowing it to be a
superstition? Without faith in their own platform, a faith as intense as
that manifested by the early Christians, how can they preach? A new
superstition will come, but it is in the very essence of things that its
apostles should have no suspicion of its real nature; that they should no
more recognise the common element between the new and the old than the
early Christians recognised it between their faith and Paganism.
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