on by the great controller of all things; he was made in the likeness of the Lord of lords; he was of kin to the power before which all the visible world trembled; and every detail in the life of a human soul became vaster, beyond all comparison, than the depths of space and time.  But not only did the sense of man’s dignity thus develop, and become definite.  The accompanying sense of his degradation became intenser and more definite also.  The gloom of a sense of sin is to be found in AEschylus, but this gloom was vague and formless.  Christianity gave to it both depth and form; only the despair that might have been produced in this way was now softened by hope.  Christianity has, in fact, declared clearly a supernatural of which men before were more or less ignorantly conscious.  The declaration may or may not have been a complete one, but at any rate it is the completest that the world has yet known.  And the practical result is this:  when we, in these days, deny the supernatural, we are denying it in a way in which it was never denied before.  Our denial is beyond all comparison more complete.  The supernatural, for the ancient world, was like a perfume scenting life, out of a hundred different vessels, of which only two or three were visible to the same men or nations.  They therefore might get rid of these, and yet the larger part of the scent would still remain to them.  But for us, it is as though all the perfume had been collected into a single vessel; and if we get rid of this, we shall get rid of the scent altogether.  Our air will be altogether odourless.

The materialism of Lucretius is a good instance of this.  In many ways his denials bear a strong resemblance to ours.  But the resemblance ceases a little below the surface.  He denied the theology of his time as strongly as our positive thinkers deny the theology of ours.  But the theology he denied was incomplete and puerile.  He was not denying any ‘All-embracer and All-sustainer,’ for he knew of none such.  And his denial of the gods he did deny left him room for the affirmation of others, whose existence, if considered accurately, was equally inconsistent with his own scientific premisses.  Again, in his denial of any immortality for man, what he denied is not the future that we are denying.  The only future he knew of was one a belief in which had no influence on us, except for sadness.  It was a protraction only of what is worst in life; it was in no way a completion of what is best in it.  But with us the case is altogether different.  Formerly the supernatural could not be denied completely, because it was not known completely.  Not to affirm is a very different thing from to deny.  And many beliefs which the positivists of the modern world are denying, the positivists of the ancient world more or less consciously lived by.