That things developed thus was due to Paul _alone_. In the face of his practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as “_pagani_,” country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks of that grasp are visible to-day. But--how remote already from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence--and now, a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and unobtrusively.[371] About A.D. 100 there were already Christians beyond the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent. It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.[372] What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, _the_ “Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who had _lived_ with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that “_Evangelium_,” from signifying the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s companions discourse about him.