Page:Literature and Dogma (1883).djvu/114

 fixed their thoughts upon himself and upon an ideal of inwardness, mildness, and self-renouncement, instead of a phantasmagory of outward grandeur and self-assertion. But at the same time the whole train of an extra-belief, or Aberglaube, which had attached itself to Israel's old creed: The righteous is an everlasting foundation! transferred itself to the new creed brought by Jesus. And there arose, accordingly, a new Aberglaube like the old. The mild, inward, self-renouncing and sacrificed Servant of the Eternal, the new and better Messiah, was yet, before the present generation passed, to come on the clouds of heaven in power and glory like the Messiah of Daniel, to gather by trumpet-call his elect from the four winds, and to set his apostles on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. The motive of Christianity,—which was, in truth, that pure souls 'knew the voice' of Jesus as sheep know the voice of their shepherd, and felt, after seeing and hearing him, that his doctrine and ideal was what they wanted, that he was 'indeed the saviour of the world,' —this simple motive became a mixed motive, adding to its first contents a vast extra-belief of a phantasmagorical advent of Jesus Christ, a resurrection and judgment, Christ's adherents glorified, his rejectors punished everlastingly.

And when the generation, for which this advent was first fixed, had passed away without it, Christians discovered by a process of criticism common enough in popular theology, but by which, as Bishop Butler says of a like kind of process, 'anything may be made out of anything,'—they discovered that the advent had never really been fixed for that first generation by the writers of the New Testament, but that it was foretold, and certainly in store, for a later time. So the Aberglaube was perpetuated, placed out of reach of all practical test, and made stronger than ever.