The other circumstance that ennobled the Christian system was that all its parts had some significance and poetic truth, although they contained, or needed to contain, nothing empirically real. The system was a great poem which, besides being well constructed in itself, was allegorical of actual experience, and contained, as in a hieroglyph, a very deep knowledge of the world and of the human mind. For what was the object that unfolded itself before the Christian imagination, the vision that converted and regenerated the world? It was a picture of human destiny. It was an epic, containing, as it were, the moral autobiography of man. The object of Pagan religion and philosophy had been a picture of the material cosmos, conceived as a vast animal and inhabited by a multitude of individual spirits. Even the Neo-Platonists thought of nothing else, much as they might multiply abstract names for its principles and fancifully confuse them with the spheres. It was always a vast, living, physical engine, a cosmos of life in which man had a determinate province. His spirit, losing its personality, might be absorbed into the ethereal element from which it came; but this emanation and absorption was itself an unchanging process, the systole and diastole of the universal heart. Practical religion consisted in honouring the nearest gods and accepting from them man's apportioned goods, not without looking, perhaps, with a reverence that needed no ritual, to the enveloping whole that prescribed to gods and men their respective functions. Thus even Neo-Platonism represented man as a minor incident in the universe, supernatural though that universe might be. The spiritual spheres were only the invisible repetitions of the visible, as the Platonic ideas from the beginning had been only a dialectic reduplication of the objects in this world. It was against this allotment that the soul was rebelling. It was looking for a deliverance that should be not so much the consciousness of something higher as the hope of something better. Now, the great characteristic of Christianity, inherited from Judaism, was that its scheme was historical. Not existences but events were the subject of its primary interest. It presented a story, not a cosmology. It was an epic in which there was, of course, superhuman machinery, but of which the subject was man, and, notable circumstance, the Hero was a man as well. Like Buddhism, it gave the highest honour to a man who could lead his fellow-men to perfection. What had previously been the divine reality--the engine of Nature--now became a temporary stage, built for the exigencies of a human drama. What had been before a detail of the edifice--the life of man--now became the argument and purpose of the whole creation. Notable transformation, on which the philosopher cannot meditate too much.