the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to _improve upon_ the original meanings of the holy words--it was simply that they did not know these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study “the” idea of Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic _ijma_)[61] wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man of a _pneuma_ emanating from the divine _pneuma_, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century--think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther--and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again presupposed that of divine and human _pneuma_. Classical man assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two reasons--the idea’s not being there at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that his _pneuma_ was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence resurrection was thought of as ἔκ νεκρῶν, “out of the corpses.” This, in its deeper meaning, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The words of Holy Scripture were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously another meaning was substituted by the finer minds amongst Catholics; this other meaning, unmistakable already in Luther and to-day quite general, is the conception of immortality as the continued existence to all eternity of the soul as a centre of force. Were Paul or Augustine to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they would reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly erroneous and heretical.