Fearing nothing, respecting nothing that was opposed to it, and not losing heart before the difficulty of vanquishing even the most formidable enemies of the expiring Empire--the Teutons away in the North--spiritual Rome thus set about its task of appropriating humanity; and all the art of the organizer, of the orator, of the painter, sculptor and architect, was speedily ordered into its service. If the type to which its ideal aspired were not already a general fact, then it must be made a general fact. It must be reared, cultivated and maintained. Strangely enough, the feat of vanquishing the German nation proved a thousand times easier to Rome the Eternal City, than it had done to Rome the Metropolis of the Greatest Empire of antiquity. The ancient Germans, with their strong tendency to subjectivity, to fantastic brooding and to cobweb spinning, and with their coarse, brutal natures unused either to restraint or to the culture that arises from it, fell easy victims to this burning teaching of the spirit, of faith, and of sentiment;[6] and it was in their susceptible and untutored breasts that Christianity laid its firmest foundation. In its work of appropriation and consumption, as I say, the Church halted at nothing. [2] Romans viii. 6, 10, 13. [3] _Z._, III, LVI. [4] _Outlines of the History of Art_, Vol. I, p. 445. [5] See H. H. Milman, D.D., _History of Latin Christianity_ (Ed. 1864), Vol. I, p. 10. Speaking of Catholicism, he says: "It was the Roman Empire, again extended over Europe by a universal code, and a provincial government; by a hierarchy of religious prætors or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually descending to the very lowest ranks of society, the whole with a certain degree of freedom of action, but a restrained and limited freedom, and with an appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last resort." [6] See J. B. Bury, _A History of the Roman Empire_, Vol. I, p. 17: "It has been said that the function of the German nations was to be the bearers of Christianity. The growth of the new religion was indeed contemporary with the spread of the new races in the Empire, but at this time in the external events of history, so far from being closely attached to the Germans, Christianity is identified with the Roman Empire. It is long afterwards that we see the mission fulfilled. The connection lies on a psychological basis: the German character was essentially subjective. The Teutons were gifted with that susceptibility which we call heart, and it was to the needs of the heart that Christianity possessed endless potentialities of adaptation.... Christianity and Teutonism were both solvents of the ancient world, and as the German nations became afterwards entirely Christian, we see that they were historically adapted to one another." 2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by Christian Art.