Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

The excess into which Christianity at its first start most naturally fell was ultra-spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever name we may choose to characterise that high-flying system in morals which, not content with the regulation and subordination, aims at the violent subjugation and, as much as may be, the total suppression of the physical element in man. How near this abuse lay is evident, not only from the general tendency of every man to make an idol of his distinctive virtue, and of every sect to delight in the exaggeration of its most characteristic feature, but there are not a few passages of the New Testament which plainly show that the masculine Christianity of St. Paul had not more occasion to protest against those Greek libertines who turned the grace of God into licentiousness, than against those offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who professed a self-imposed arbitrary religiosity (Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from meats (I Tim. iv. 3).18 There is, indeed, something very seductive in these attempts to acquire a superhuman virtue, whether they be made by a poet casting off the vulgar bonds that bind him to his fellows, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed upon sun-dews and get drunk on transcendental imaginations, or by a religious person, that he may devote himself to spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing influence of earthly passions. Such a renunciation of the flesh gratifies his pride, and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic virtue in a special line; while, at the same time, it is with some persons more convenient, inasmuch as when the resolution is once formed and a decided start made, it is always easier to abstain than to be moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious schemes to ignore the body and to cut short the natural rights of our physical nature must fail. It never can be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it preaches and the world which it should convert. In fact, it rather gives up the world in despair, and institutes an artificial school for the practice of certain select virtues, which only a few will practise, and which, when practised, can only make those few unfit for the social position which Providence meant them to occupy.