in the way of preparation for what was coming. . . . In most branches of art, learning, and original composition the eighteenth century was below either the times before or the times after it. It seemed as if the world needed to be stirred up by some such general crash as was now near at hand. . . . It was a time [the latter part of the century] which saw such an upsetting of the existing state of things everywhere as had never happened before in so short a space of time. . . . But in this general crash the evil of the older times was largely swept away as well as the good, and means were at least given for a better state of things to begin in our own time."[1]
VIII.— PAGE I15.
THIS topic is nowhere more finely treated than in Matheson's Growth of the Spirit of Christianity:—
"Let us marshal once again the testimonies of the past. We have seen the mind of man sleeping profoundly in China, dreaming wildlyin Brahma, reposing restlessly in Buddha, half-waking in Persia, fully conscious in Egypt, strongly active in Greece. Then we have seen the life of strength taken up into the life of sacrifice, the power to do transmuted into the power to suffer, and Paganism fading in the light of Christianity. Christianity itself we have beheld rising from very small beginnings: first, the infant that could only wonder; next, at the Pentecostal outpouring, the child learning to speak; then, in the home associations of Jerusalem, the child learning to feel. By and by we have seen these home associations broken, and Christianity driven forth to seek an enlarged sympathy and a wider brotherhood. We have seen the child's first guesses at truth, its first
experiences of worldly contact, and its first dreams of worldly .
ambition. We have marked how these dreams were disappointed in the very act of their fulfilment, and how the attainment of childhood's goal was the death of childhood's joy. Then we have followed the spirit of Christianity from the life of childhood into the life of school: have seen it first trained under the abbot, and afterwards under the rod of the Roman bishop. We have observed the gradual yet steady development of that
scholastic life, from its beginning in the representation of truth
- ↑ Edw. A. Freeman: General Sketch of History (Am. ed.), pp: 325-27.
