The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the 'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the children of God and capable of communion with Him. It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of the other within its proper sphere. It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.