No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the particular system), on the other, came into the picture, which presents (as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit _with a time connotation_—that is, as a drama in which the one prevails over the other. The historical change of period wears the characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.” This “world-history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial, but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any _natural_ extension. But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The oriental picture was _at rest_. It presented a self-contained antithesis, with equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning-point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it was quickly transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the change) into a conception of a _linear progress_: from Homer or Adam—the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus—through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and Paris according to the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme. This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more.[14] It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfilment and culmination, and which had an objective point.