It is true that, along with his own philosophy, systematized and dramatized for him by Israel, the average man received some fragments of the spiritual teaching of Christ. But he accepted that teaching, not for its own sake, not for the sake of the philosophy that was behind it--of that he knew nothing, and had it been revealed to him he would have shrunk from it with suspicion and alarm--but for the sake and on the authority of Christ. His own interpretation of it was, as might have been expected, at best one-sided and inadequate, at worst literal and mechanical; and so disquieting were its precepts, owing to his inability to enter into their spirit, that an instinctive regard for his own mental balance and sanity led him in nine cases out of ten to ignore them completely. But the fact remains that, in a sense and in a manner, he did receive the spiritual teaching of Christ, and that from then till now the ferment of it has been at work in his heart. As, however, it was through the example rather than the words of his Master that the spiritual ideas which have been the leaven

of his inner life were transmitted to him, it is not to be wondered at that his reception of them has been in the main a subconscious process, and that they have not materially modified the movement of his conscious thought. For many centuries, indeed, his acceptance of his own philosophy was complete. Those who offered to shake his faith in it--Gnostics, Arians, Albigenses, and the like--fared ill at his hands. Through his Agent-General, the Pope, and in the Councils which were dominated by his "collective wisdom," he waged relentless war against heretics and schismatics; and at last things came to such a pass that whoever sent even a faint ripple of doubt over the stagnant lagoon of his (so-called) faith, whoever said or did anything which might conceivably give him the trouble of turning over in his orthodox slumber, was liable to be burned at the stake.

This triumph, in the region of speculative thought, of the average over the exceptional man, was a misfortune for the human race. For it involved the suppression of high-thinking, which is in its very essence a departure from the commonplace and the average; and the suppression of high-thinking involves, in the last resort, the suppression of spiritual desire. Not, indeed, that it is possible for spiritual desire to be finally suppressed. The expansive forces of Nature, the expression of which in man's inner life constitutes his spiritual desire, may be dammed back for centuries, but