IX

The two streams, the one traceable to the customs and superstitions of the German tribes, and the other to the Church of the decaying Roman Empire, is clearly visible in the social and religious system of the Middle Ages. Feudalism was as entirely the offspring of the former as Monasticism was of the latter. The “hale young knight,” whose “hand was in his country’s right, whose heart was in his lady’s bower,” was as lineally descended from the German of Tacitus, who followed his chief to battle, as the “religious recluse” was from the monks of the Thebaid. Throughout the Middle Ages we can see the true streams of tendency – sometimes uniting, sometimes in conflict. It is quite clear that the acceptance of Christianity by the German peoples could have been little more than nominal. How could the German in the full vigour of tribal life really embrace a religion which placed the highest object of existence in submissive suffering, to purify the individual soul, as against that which the early world with one consent regarded as summing up the whole duty of man, namely, fighting and working for the political body? And in fact lie did not accept it more than nominally. Duty, fealty to the feudal superior, as representing the community, continued for ages to be the mainspring of his life. Even with the monk, as a general rule, it was the welfare of his order which was uppermost in his thoughts rather than his own personal salvation, as Carlyle has remarked in Past and Present, and this, notwithstanding that the genesis of Monasticism itself is traceable to a totally opposite sentiment.

The Protestant notion of “reverence” that is, of a special sanctimonious bearing towards things religious, is a direct offspring of that extreme separation of religion from daily life which Protestant:, and above all Puritan, Christianity represents. It is nearly certain that the early Christians did not know it, and that their love-feasts were not “prayer-meetings.” They were too near to Paganism with its joyous festivals and its conception of a living intercourse between gods and men, to have appreciated the morose priggishness involved in the “reverential attitude of mind” which is de rigeur with Protestantism. A religion which really interpenetrates life does not require the “reverential” pose. Homo sum, et nil humani a me alienum puto. Levity is a side of human nature, and a religion that eschews levity by that very fact signs its own death-warrant as a living power among men. I should observe in spite of what has just been said, that Christianity, without doubt, contained from the first the germ of this sentiment, although it may not have manifested itself immediately; British Sabbatarism is the hideous abortion it has brought forth.