In a
nation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at
baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic passions, in
themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.
Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it
was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or
less Christian.
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