A portion of these truths had perhaps been suspected by certain wise men of ancient times, but their full, broad, luminous revelation dates from the Gospels.  The pagan schools walked in darkness, feeling their way, clinging to falsehoods as well as to truths in their haphazard journeying.  Some of their philosophers occasionally cast upon certain subjects feeble gleams which illuminated but one side and made the darkness of the other side more profound.  Hence all the phantoms created by ancient philosophy.  None but divine wisdom was capable of substituting an even and all-embracing light for all those flickering rays of human wisdom.  Pythagoras, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, are torches:  Christ is the glorious light of day.

Nothing could be more material, indeed, than the ancient theogony.  Far from proposing, as Christianity does, to separate the spirit from the body, it ascribes form and features to everything, even to impalpable essences, even to the intelligence.  In it everything is visible, tangible, fleshly.  Its gods need a cloud to conceal themselves from men’s eyes.  They eat, drink, and sleep.  They are wounded and their blood flows; they are maimed, and lo! they limp forever after.  That religion has gods and halves of gods.  Its thunderbolts are forged on an anvil, and among other things three rays of twisted rain (tres imbris torti radios) enter into their composition.  Its Jupiter suspends the world by a golden chain; its sun rides in a four-horse chariot; its hell is a precipice the brink of which is marked on the globe; its heaven is a mountain.

Thus paganism, which moulded all creations from the same clay, minimizes divinity and magnifies man.  Homer’s heroes are of almost the same stature as his gods.  Ajax defies Jupiter, Achilles is the peer of Mars.  Christianity on the contrary, as we have seen, draws a broad line of division between spirit and matter.  It places an abyss between the soul and the body, an abyss between man and God.

At this point—­to omit nothing from the sketch upon which we have ventured—­we will call attention to the fact that, with Christianity, and by its means, there entered into the mind of the nations a new sentiment, unknown to the ancients and marvellously developed among moderns, a sentiment which is more than gravity and less than sadness—­melancholy.  In truth, might not the heart of man, hitherto deadened by religions purely hierarchical and sacerdotal, awake and feel springing to life within it some unexpected faculty, under the breath of a religion that is human because it is divine, a religion which makes of the poor man’s prayer, the rich man’s wealth, a religion of equality, liberty and charity?  Might it not see all things in a new light, since the Gospel had shown it the soul through the senses, eternity behind life?