Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/119

 clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third man—he is harder to speak of. He has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. He is the origins—he is the man in the forest. It is no part of our subject to elaborate the point; but it may be said in passing that the chief claim of Christianity is exactly this—that it revived the pre-Roman madness, yet brought into it the Roman order. The gods had really died long before Christ was born. What had taken their place was simply the god of government—Divus Cæsar. The pagans of the real Roman Empire were nothing if not respectable. It is said that when Christ was born the cry went through the world that Pan was dead. The truth is that when Christ was born Pan for the first time began to stir in his grave. The pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new lease of life as devils. I venture to wager that if you found one man in such a society who seriously believed in the personal existence of Apollo, he was probably a Christian. Chris