incomprehensible fate. "If we now turn to consider the mental conditions of educated men at that time, we shall see that they transformed the Olympus of personal and concrete gods into symbols of the forces of nature, and that they had risen to a purer conception of the deity by making it agree with the progress of reason; but this deity was so remote from earth as to have scarcely anything to do with the government of the world. According to the teaching of the Stoics, which was very generally diffused, man was supposed to be so far left to himself that he was the creator of his own virtue, and had to struggle, not only against nature and his fellow-man, but against fate, the underlying essence of every cosmic form and motion. If this pagan rationalism gave rise to great theoretic morality, and produced amazing examples of private and public virtue, it had little effect on the multitudes, nor did it contain any guiding principle for the historical life of humanity as a whole. "Christianity proclaimed the spiritual unity of God, the unity of the race, the brotherhood of all peoples, the redemption of the world, and consequently a providential influence on mankind. Christianity taught that God himself was made man, and lived among men. Such teaching was offered to the people as a truth of consciousness rather than of dogma, although it was afterwards preserved in a theological form by the preaching of Paul, and the pagan mind was more affected by sentiment than by reason. The unity of God was associated in their aesthetic imagination with the earlier conception of the supreme Zeus, which now took a more Semitic form, and Olympus was gloriously transformed into a company of elect Christians and holy fathers of the new faith. A confused sentiment as to the mystic union of peoples, who became brothers in Christ, had a powerful effect on the imagination and the heart, since they had already learned to regard the world as the creation of one eternal Being. In the ardour of proselytism and of the diffusion of the new creed, they hailed the historical transformation of the earthly endeavour after temporal acquisitions and pleasures into a providential preparation for the heavenly kingdom. "In Christ, the incarnation of the supreme God, they beheld the apotheosis of man, so acceptable to the Aryan race, since he thus became the absolute ruler of the world and its fates. Ideas and sentiments, of which the Semitic mind was incapable, and which were opposed to their historical and intellectual development, moved and satisfied the Aryan mind, and became associated as far as possible with the dogma and belief to which the race had attained in their pagan civilization. Thus heaven, dogma, and Christian rites assumed from the first a pagan form; and while the original idols were repudiated in the zeal for new principles, their common likeness was maintained by the imaginative power of the race.