critical moment came Constantine, and placed Christianity,--or let us
rather say, placed the human spirit, whose totality was endangered,--
in contact with the main current of human life. And his work was
justified by its fruits, in men like Augustine and Dante, and indeed
in all the great men of Christianity, Catholics or Protestants, ever
since. And one may go beyond this. Monsieur Albert Reville, whose
religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception
which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity
and its founder, is probably destined to become the conception which
Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond of saying
the same thing about the Socinian conception of Christianity. Even
if this were true, it would still have been [xlvii] better for a man,
through the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian,
and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have
been a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with the main
stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual
growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to
him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion
which he may hold or think he holds. Luther,--whom we have called a
Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philistine, had a
coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which have harmed his
disciples, but who, because he was a genius, had splendid flashes of
spiritual insight,--Luther says admirably in his Commentary on the
Book of Daniel: "A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests
with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then the
God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is
illusory." In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God
and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the
man is, depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a
perfect and total man.