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The Church had undertaken the gigantic task of subduing and enlightening the semi-pagan peoples of France and Germany and England. When we look back at that period some will unjustly censure Rome for not controlling more completely the savagery of the medievals. More fairly should we wonder at the great measure of success which had already been achieved.
It was a semi-pagan theosophy, a product of Greek and oriental, as well as of purely Christian speculation; therefore it was anathema to the orthodox. We propose to begin the study of the antecedents of monophysitism by examining those of a Christian or semi-Christian character.
The great dancing mania of 1374 occurred immediately after the revels connected with the semi-Pagan festival of St. John. Bacchanalian dances formed one of the accompaniments of the festival of St. John, and made, so to speak, a natural starting-point for the epidemic.
There is one Protestant mission up at Addis Abeba, but it confines its attentions to the semi-pagan Gallas, having given up Christian Abyssinia as a bad job. Somaliland is a poor field for missionary enterprise, owing to the sparse, semi-nomadic population and the difficulties of getting about.
We know not how to reconcile this monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under Lorenzo di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of gross bigotry or of profane derision."
The Church had undertaken the gigantic task of subduing and enlightening the semi-pagan peoples of France and Germany and England. When we look back at that period some will unjustly censure Rome for not controlling more completely the savagery of the medievals. More fairly should we wonder at the great measure of success which had already been achieved.
It was marvelously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship.
That, all things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism, which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians is not to be thought of.
In 1485 Caxton publishes Malory's selections from French and English sources, the whole being Tennyson's main source, Le Mort d'Arthur. Thus the Arthur stories, originally Celtic, originally a mass of semi-pagan legend, myth, and marchen, have been retold and rehandled by Norman, Englishman, and Frenchman, taking on new hues, expressing new ideals religious, chivalrous, and moral.
In the next he rather surprises the reader by exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus Christ, but not after the manner of Saint Paul. No doubt, the secular and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy of a great many readers, to whom, however, it will be interesting as a literary curiosity.
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