Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/132

and in due time formulated in the conception of God set forth by that greatest and most accredited doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. This raises a nice question of exegesis, into which we cannot go with any fulness; but I will say, in passing, that if the statement is correct it only shows how far men’s efforts to analyse and to formulate their highest and deepest practical insights fall short of the facts. It is too true that much of the theology which professes and aims to be Christian is in reality only the clothing or wrapping of Christianity in the prechristian garments that have descended to the West as heirlooms from the East, or to the converted West as inheritances from its paganism. And we ought never to forget, therefore, that the real test of the faith of Christians is the implications in their religious conduct, and not at all their attempts, most likely unsuccessful, or at least unhappy, to analyse those implications and set them formally forth. In these attempts, transmitted beliefs quite below the Christian level, accepted and continued habits of ritual, and modes of feeling, that are nothing but survivals from the faiths which the new vision in Christ would forever put away, will inevitably play a large part. They have in fact played too large a part; a part so large that the thought which Jesus imparted to mankind, and which has survived and flourished in spite of them, has been almost buried from view in the wrappages compacted out of these prechristian materials, — materials for the most part drawn from the Orient, whence they came from the religions and philosophies the very remotest from the Glad Tidings