Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/37



N inside view of Christianity, as it now exists, offers a spectacle which, in some of its aspects, is anything but edifying. If we could suppose ourselves to survey its present state and take account of its elements, with well-developed intellects, indeed, and yet with but indifferent historic knowledge, or none at all, we might regard it as the scattered fragments of what had once been a system, but had become wholly disrupted. We might feel like joining with the infidel, who deems its sacred books a mixture of fact and fable, imposed upon the credulity of the race, or with the pessimist so far as he is another person from the infidel, whose whole utterance is a series of complaints that the world is out of joint and fast going to wreck. Indeed, the ablest, most exemplary, and most cheerful Christian minds, with this fragmentary maze before them, sometimes utter pessimistic sentiments.

All Christendom, however, in a normal state of mind—though few may be fully conscious of this, and fewer still