Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/87

 82 as a hiding-place from the wind, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. There are virtues which are distinctively Christian, virtues like charity and meekness, which were undefined, or scorned, or condemned outright by the pagan world; and we naturally think of Christ mostly for those qualities wherein he differed from Cato. But this has led us to import a tone of softness into the very sound of the word Jesus. In the first thousand years of Christian history the bias must have been the other way, to judge from the Fathers, and from the pictured majesty of basilican apses; but the hymns of S. Bernard are not the first examples of the melting of severity into sweetness; if the cultus of S. Mary tended again to harden the features of Christ in the popular mind, nineteenth-century sentimentalism has certainly undone any evil of that kind, while the Catholic tendency has for long been to worship Christ only in the cradle and on the cross. No doubt it will always be difficult for us to remember the two sides at once, as it is to think of strength without sternness and of love without infirmity.

There are virtues distinctively Christian, as there are qualities in the character of our Lord which were lacking in the great men before him; but the so-called pagan virtues are none the less Christian because they are a necessary part of all lofty natures.