De Crucis understood the force of these traditional influences; but Odo,
in common with the more cultivated men of his day, had lived too long in
an atmosphere of polite scepticism to measure the profound hold of
religion on the consciousness of the people. Christ had been so long
banished from the drawing-room that it was has hard to believe that He
still ruled in field and vineyard. To men of Odo's stamp the piety of
the masses was a mere superficial growth, a kind of mental mould to be
dried off by the first beams of knowledge. He did not conceive it as a
habit of thought so old that it had become instinctive, so closely
intertwined with every sense that to hope to eradicate it was like
trying to drain all the blood from a man's body without killing him. He
knew nothing of the unwearied workings of that power, patient as a
natural force, which, to reach spirits darkened by ignorance and eyes
dulled by toil, had stooped to a thousand disguises, humble, tender and
grotesque--peopling the earth with a new race of avenging or protecting
deities, guarding the babe in the cradle and the cattle in the stalls,
blessing the good man's vineyard or blighting the crops of the
blasphemer, guiding the lonely traveller over torrents and precipices,
smoothing the sea and hushing the whirlwind, praying with the mother
over her sick child, and watching beside the dead in plague-house and
lazaret and galley--entering into every joy and grief of the obscurest
consciousness, penetrating to depths of misery which no human compassion
ever reached, and redressing by a prompt and summary justice wrongs of
which no human legislation took account.
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