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As she had told the Duchess, the Catholicism instilled into her youth by the Bruges nuns still laid upon her at times its ghostly and compelling hand. Now in her renewed strength she was inclined to look upon it as an element of weakness and disintegration in her nature. She resolved, in future, to free herself more entirely from a useless Aberglaube.
And almost immediately after "Aberglaube" regathered; and devotion to Jesus took the form of an Extra-belief of some future advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the triumphs of His followers. And this process of development, begun while Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death.
For his delicate humour and lambent satire always had in view simply the practical object of clearing a plain way for the good life through the "Aberglaube" of theology. His description of God as "the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness," might seem, in fact, the negation of Pantheism, because, if God is not ourselves, there is something other than God.
But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the Aberglaube of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment. It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards.
Thus his pages are valuable to the student of superstition, because they contain 'the clash of the country' for about forty years, and illustrate the rural or ecclesiastical aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence. A diary of Wodrow's exists, dating from April 3, 1697, when he was but nineteen years of age.
It is open, doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon Matthew Arnold's Aberglaube; but who, it has been well said, "are most likely to have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and candid, who undertake to reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to disentangle them from the supposed subjective reflections of His disciples?
For a complete and recent study of the question, see A. Lehmann, Aberglaube und Zauberei von den ältesten Zeiten bis in die Gegenwart, 1898. Lang, op. cit., I, 96. There will be found many other facts of this kind.
And for him, as for the great majority of searching men, the more the mists of pious aberglaube lift, the more real, the more fair, and the more divine becomes the Face of that living Christ, the more close the sense of His companionship. A friend of mine once asked him, "Are you a Christian or a Neoplatonist?" He smiled. "It would be difficult to say," he replied.
For the object of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness. So soon as we go beyond this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief, aberglaube, which always revenges itself. These are the main contentions of his book, Literature and Dogma, 1875.
This, says Arnold, was Extra-belief, "Aberglaube," belief beyond what is certain and veritable. "Extra-belief is the poetry of life." The Messianic ideas were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came.
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