258 ST. MARK’S REST

Now these two histories of the religion and policy of Venice are only intense abstracts of the same course of thought and events in every nation of Europe. Throughout the whole of Christendom, the two stories in like manner proceed together. The acceptance of Christianity-the practice of it-the abandonment of it-and moral ruin. The development of kingly authority-the obedience to it-the corruption of it-and social ruin. But there is no evidence that the first of these courses of national fate is vitally connected with the second. That infidel kings may be just, and Christian ones corrupt, was the first lesson Venice learned when she began to be a scholar.

65. And observe there are three quite distinct conditions of feeling and assumptions of theory in which we may approach this matter. The first, that of our numerous cockney friends,-that the dukes of Venice were mostly hypocrites, and if not, fools; that their pious zeal was merely such a cloak for their commercial appetite as modern church-going is for modern swindling; or else a pitiable hallucination and puerility:-that really the attention of the supreme cockney mind would be wasted on such bygone absurdities, and that out of mere respect for the common-sense of monkey-born-and-bred humanity, the less we say of them the better.

The second condition of feeling is, in its full confession, a very rare one;-that of true respect for the Christian faith, and sympathy with the passions and imaginations it excited, while yet, in security of modern enlightenment, the observer regards the faith itself only as an exquisite dream of mortal childhood, and the acts of its votaries as a beautifully deceived heroism of vain hope.

This theory of the splendid mendacity¹ of Heaven, and majestic somnambulism of man, I have only known to be held in the sincere depth of its discomfort, by one of my wisest and dearest friends, under the pressure of uncomprehended sorrow in his own personal experience. But to

¹ [Horace: Odes, iii. 11, 35.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]