The Church's successes, however, were not all legitimate; they were not everywhere due to a real correspondence between her forms and the ideal life of men. It was only the inhabitants of the Græco-Roman world that were quite prepared to understand her. When the sword, or the authority of a higher worldly civilization, carried her influence beyond the borders of the Roman Empire we may observe that her authority seldom proved stable. She was felt, by those peoples whose imaginative traditions and whose moral experience she did not express, to be something alien and artificial. The Teutonic races finally threw off what they felt to be her yoke. If they reconstructed their religion out of elements which she had furnished, that was only because religion is bound to be traditional, and they had been Christians for many hundred years. A wholly new philosophy or poetry could not have taken immediate root in their minds; even the philosophy which Germany has since produced, when the national spirit was reaching, so to speak, its majority, hardly seems able to constitute an independent religion, but takes shelter under some form of Christianity, however much the spirit of that religion may be transformed. At first, indeed, the new movement took the Bible for its starting-point. So heterogeneous a book, which was already habitually interpreted in so many fanciful ways, was indeed an admirable basis for the imagination to build upon. The self-reliant and dreamy Teuton could spin out of the Biblical chronicles and rhapsodies convictions after his own heart; while his fixed persuasion that the Bible was the word of God, was strengthened (not illegitimately) by his ability to make it express his own moral ideals. The intensity of his religion was proportionate to the degree in which he had made it the imaginative rendering of his own character.