There is a curious pathos in the attempt of every vigorous outgrowth of human endeavour to disown the prior activity which gave it birth. The ancient fable of the chick and the egg-shell is of perennial meaning and pertinence. Militant Christianity marched forward wholly unconscious of its own vast debt to the very paganism upon which it thrust itself in holy war. The novel fervour of asceticism had extinguished science before the end of the third century, art in the sixth and seventh, and the Greek language by the ninth. But the transition of Italy from paganism to Christianity was not a substitution of wholly new ideals for old. It was the gradual absorption of all the permanent elements in pagan culture into a religion of which the germ only was brought from the Hebrew world, and which owed most of its strength and much of its weakness to the rich and heterogeneous soil in which it was planted. The extravagances of mediæval Christianity—its austere intolerance and contempt of the natural and obvious, its demand, in the first strenuous tension of novelty and triumph, for the subjective and the transcendental life—breaking up, when the strain was relaxed, into a hard formalism of thought and practice—these were but the inevitable reaction from the grossness of a degenerate paganism whose vital force was spent. The immense lapse of time occupied by the transition from paganism to Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet ably points out in dealing with the issues of that change, gave room for as many secondary waves of action and reaction within itself as did the movement of the Renaissance which succeeded it. “From the first distinct breach in naïve or natural paganism to the assumption of a definitely doctrinal and orthodox form of Christianity, there is an interval which cannot be reckoned at less than seven hundred years, from the death of Socrates to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. So far from being a new thing, contrasting with the degradation of the pagan world, the establishment of Christianity was the issue of the advance of that world during four centuries, and it was not thoroughly completed until, in a further development of five centuries, it had adopted from paganism the germs of almost all permanently valuable elements that the latter contained.... The Dark Ages are not a proof that the great classical culture had lost its power for human welfare; they prove only how long a discipline was needed by the mass of humanity before it could appreciate more than the first stammering misapprehension of its great inheritance.”[2]