Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his _Apologia_, explains how he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that behind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense of the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the 'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits 'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the seven churches."'[13] In 1837 ... I said ... 'Take England with many high virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of Heaven nor Hell.' [13] Newman, _Apologia_ (1864), pp. 91, 92. Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word 'church' and the 'possibilities of personification which it offered.'[14] This use may have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. But when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not to those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Religious history affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shall bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses--the sacred food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types. [14] Harnack, _Expansion of Christianity_ (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.