C.—PERVERSION.
The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by the conviction that life is worth living, and that all its social and intellectual summits can be reached by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But the basis of that confidence was undermined by a doctrine which denied the value of earthly existence, and made the renunciation of worldly blessings the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim of life who had been taught to spurn earth as a vale of tears, and turn his hopes to the promises of another world, was not apt to trouble himself about a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, moreover, he had been distinctly instructed to trust to the chances of the current day: “Take no thought for the morrow;” “Take no thought for your life, nor yet for your body … for after all these things do the gentiles seek.”
Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose, vitiated the politics of the Christian nations through-out the long chaos of the Middle Ages, and in their features of individual character there is a strange want of that moral unity and harmony which the consciousness of an attainable purpose gave to the national exemplars of an earlier age.
The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries has greatly modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian nations; the legitimacy of secular pursuits is more generally recognized, but still only in a furtive, hesitating [[121]]manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily practice with the theories of a still prevalent system of ethics cannot fail to involve contradictions incompatible with true consistency of principles and action.