The principle by which the Christian system had developed, although reapplied by the Protestants to their own inner life, was not understood by them in its historical applications. They had little sympathy with the spiritual needs and habits of that Pagan society in which Christianity had grown up. That society had found in Christianity a sort of last love, a rejuvenating supersensible hope, and had bequeathed to the Gospel of Redemption, for its better embodiment and ornament, all its own wealth of art, philosophy, and devotion. This embodiment of Christianity represented a civilization through which the Teutonic races had not passed and which they never could have produced; it appealed to a kind of imagination and sentiment which was foreign to them. This embodiment, accordingly, was the object of their first and fiercest attack, really because it was unsympathetic to their own temperament but ostensibly because they could not find its basis in those Hebraic elements of Christianity which make up the greater bulk of the Bible. They did not value the sublime aspiration of Christianity to be not something Hebraic or Teutonic but something Catholic and human; and they blamed everything which went beyond the accidental limits of their own sympathies and the narrow scope of their own experience. Yet it was only by virtue of this complement inherited from Paganism, or at least supplied by the instincts and traditions on which Paganism had reposed, that Christianity could claim to approach a humane universality or to achieve an imaginative adequacy. The problem was to compose, in the form of a cosmic epic, with metaphysical justifications and effectual starting-points for moral action, the spiritual autobiography of man. The central idea of this composition was to be the idea of a Redemption. Around this were to be gathered and moulded together elements drawn from Hebrew tradition and scripture, others furnished by Paganism, together with all that the living imagination of the time could create. Nor was it right or fitting to make a merely theoretical or ethical synthesis. Doctrine must find its sensible echo in worship, in art, in the feasts and fasts of the year. Only when thus permeating life and expressing itself to every sense and faculty can a religion be said to have reached completion; only then has the imagination exhausted its means of utterance.