Tact, good sense, ever the note of a true orthodoxy, the merciful compromises of the church, indicative of her imperial vocation in regard to all the varieties of human kind, with a universality of which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding is but a prototype, was already become conspicuous, in spite of a discredited, irritating, vindictive society, all around her.
Against that divine urbanity and moderation [122] the old error of Montanus we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt--sour, falsely anti-mundane, ever with an air of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste in particular for all the peculiar graces of womanhood.

By it the desire to please was understood to come of the author of evil.

In this interval of quietness, it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of reaction, that some such extravagances of the religious temper should arise.

But again the church of Rome, now becoming every day more and more completely the capital of the Christian world, checked the nascent Montanism, or puritanism of the moment, vindicating for all Christian people a cheerful liberty of heart, against many a narrow group of sectaries, all alike, in their different ways, accusers of the genial creation of God.

With her full, fresh faith in the Evangele--in a veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the dignity of man's entire personal being--for a season, at least, at that critical period in the development of Christianity, she was for reason, for common sense, for fairness to human nature, and generally for what may be called the naturalness of Christianity .-- As also for its comely order: she would be "brought to her king in raiment of needlework." It was by the bishops of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the true catholic sense, into universal pastors, that the path of what we must call humanism was thus defined.
[123] And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at last the catholic church might venture to show her outward lineaments as they really were, worship--"the beauty of holiness," nay! the elegance of sanctity--was developed, with a bold and confident gladness, the like of which has hardly been the ideal of worship in any later age.