'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above the clouds. Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the eternal Kingdom. While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.' The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil; and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms. Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his landscape was absorbed by the gods. To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one. The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence. The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only the importance of a link in a chain. As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a conception of life in which nothing retained independent significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, discovered at the same time the worth of the individual. And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized.