"The very name of Aryan, transmitted in a modified form to all successive generations, denotes dominion and valour; the Brahmanic cosmogony, and the epithet of apes, given to all other races in the epic of Valmiki, bear witness to the same fact; it is shown in the slavery imposed on conquered peoples, in the hatred of foreigners felt by all the Hellenic tribes; in the omnipotence of Rome, the haughtiness of the Germanic orders; in the feudal system, in the Crusades; and finally, in the modern sense of our superiority to all other existing races. The quickness of perception, and the facile projection of human personality into natural objects, led to the manifold creations of Olympus, and this was an aesthetic obstacle to any nearer approach to the pure and absolute conception of God, while the innate pride of race was a hindrance to our humiliation in the dust before God. The Semites declared that man was created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while conscious of the power of the _numina_ we confronted them boldly, and were ready to resist them. The Indian legends, and those of the Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of conflicts between gods and men. The demi-gods must be remembered, showing that the Aryans believed themselves to be sufficiently noble and great for the gods to love them, and to intermarry with them. Thus the Aryan made himself into a God, and often took a glorious place in Olympus, while he declared that God was made man. "We might imagine that the doctrine of God incarnate would be as repugnant to the ideas, feelings, and intellect of the Aryan as it was to the Semitic race. But the anthropomorphic side of Christianity was readily embraced by the former as a mythical and aesthetic conception, and indeed it was they who made a metaphorical expression into an essential dogma: the pride natural to the Aryan race made them eager to accept a religion which placed man in a still higher Olympus: a belief in Christ was rapidly diffused, not as God but as the Man-God. These are the true reasons, not only for the rapid spread of Christianity in Europe, but also for the philosophic systems of the Platonists and Alexandrines which preceded it. Although Philo was a Hebrew, and probably knew nothing of Christ, he attained by means of Hellenism to the idea of the Man-God; the Platonic Word, which was merely the projection of God into human reason, was accepted for the same reason as the Christian dogma of the Word made man.