that might revivify the older ideals of life, and suit the new spiritual requirements of the people. But the ethical force of Christianity was too great for Neo-Platonism which, on account of its more metaphysical[103:1] character, had no message for the people at large, and was consequently inaccessible to the rude barbarian who, being influenced by the actual life of the persecuted Christian adopted Christianity, and settled down to construct new empires out of the ruins of the old. In Persia the influence of culture-contacts and cross-fertilisation of ideas created in certain minds a vague desire to realise a similar restatement of Islam, which gradually assimilated Christian ideals as well as Christian Gnostic speculation, and found a firm foundation in the Qur’ān. The flower of Greek Thought faded away before the breath of Christianity; but the burning simoon of Ibn Taimiyya's invective could not touch the freshness of the Persian rose. The one was completely swept away by the flood of barbarian invasions; the other, unaffected by the Tartar revolution, still holds its own. [102:1] "Tidings have reached us that Valerian has been defeated, and is now in the hands of Sapor. The threats of Franks and Allemanni, of Goths and Persians, are alike terrible by turns to our _degenerate_ Rome." (Plotinus to Flaccus; quoted by Vaughan in his Half hours with Mystics, p. 63.) [103:1] The element of ecstacy which could have appealed to some minds was thrown into the background by the later teachers of Neo-Platonism, so that it became a mere system of thought having no human interest. Says Whittaker:--"The mystical ecstacy was not found by the later teachers of the school easier to attain, but more difficult; and the tendency became more and more to regard it as all but unattainable on earth." Neo-Platonism, p. 101.