Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
touchstone of orthodoxy; tradition itself was tested by this standard. By this standard the canon of Scripture was fixed, so as neither to exclude the Old Testament, which the pure metaphysicians would have rejected, nor to accept every gospel that circulated under the name of an apostle, and which might please a wonder-loving and detail-loving piety. By the same criterion the ritual was composed, the dogma developed, the nature of Christ defined, the sacraments and discipline of the Church regulated. The result was a comprehensive system where, under the shadow of a great epic, which expanded and interpreted the history of mankind from the Creation to the Day of Doom, a place was found for as many religious instincts and as many religious traditions as possible; while at the same time the dialectic proficiency of an age that inherited the discipline of Greek philosophy, introduced into the system a great consistency and a great metaphysical subtlety. Time mellowed and expanded these dogmas, bringing them into relation with the needs of a multiform piety; a justification was found both for asceticism and for a virtuous naturalism, both for contemplation and for action; and thus it became possible for the Church to insinuate her sanctions and her spirit into the motives of men, and to embody the religion of many nations during many ages.

The Church's successes, however, were not all legitimate; they were not everywhere due to a real correspondence between her forms and the ideal life of men. It was only the inhabitants of the Græco-Roman world that were quite prepared to understand her. When the sword, or the authority of a higher worldly civilization, carried her influence beyond the borders of the Roman Empire we may observe that her authority seldom proved stable. She was felt, by those peoples whose imaginative traditions and whose moral experience she did not express, to be something alien and artificial. The Teutonic races finally threw off what they felt to be her yoke. If they reconstructed their religion out of elements which she had furnished, that was only because religion is bound to be traditional, and they had been Christians for many hundred years. A wholly new philosophy or poetry could not have taken immediate root in their minds; even the philosophy which Germany has since produced, when the national spirit was reaching, so to speak, its majority, hardly seems able to constitute an independent religion, but takes shelter under some form of Christianity, however much the spirit of that religion may be transformed.

At first, indeed, the new movement took the Bible for its starting-point. So heterogeneous a book, which was already habitually 
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