For example, at the end of the second century—no doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’ instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word, as is often the case, split up into two, _sacrament_ remaining within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old technical meaning of _mystery_, while _mystery_ itself, freed from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for _suffering_, used in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross, gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’. From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know to-day. For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on, say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human thought and feeling, such as _God_ and _love_, _life_ and _death_, _heaven_ and _hell_,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a fifteenth-century English carol: I sing of a maiden That is makeless;[31] King of all kings To her son she ches.[32] He came al so still There his mother was, As dew in April That falleth on the grass. He came al so still To his mother’s bour, As dew in April That falleth on the flour. He came al so still There his mother lay, As dew in April That falleth on the spray. Mother and maiden Was never none but she; Well may such a lady Goddes mother be. In such a poem we have once more a kind of cross-section of the growth of European outlook. Between its lines we seem to be able to hear, as in a dream, the monotonous intonings of Egyptian priests, the quiet words of Socrates in the Academy, and the alert speculative hum of the Alexandrian world. It is so graceful that for the moment it seems as though all these things, with all the pillages and massacres and crucifixions and vast imperial achievements of Rome, had been conspiring together merely to load the homely old Teutonic word ‘loaf-kneader’ with new semantic significance, to transform it into that mystery and symbol in the imaginations of men, a _lady_.