The result was that human nature as it is seemed to the one much more worthy of respect and much less seriously compromised than it did to the other. Comparing man as he is, only with man as he easily might be, the Greeks took a much less serious view of his state than the Hebrews, who compared him with God as He had revealed Himself. The former never attained any clear conception of sin, and regarded it as a passing weakness which could without much trouble be overcome. The latter saw that it was a radical and now innate want of harmony with God, which could only be cured by a new life being breathed into man from above. And when Europe became Christian, this difference made itself felt in very widespread religious and theological divergences. In the South and among the Latin races the less strenuous view of human disabilities--the view which naturally grew out of the heathen conception of man as, on the whole, born good, with no very arduous moral heights to scale--has prevailed, and in those regions the Pelagian form of doctrine has mastered the Christian Church. But the Teutonic races have, in this matter, shown a remarkable affinity with the Hebrew mind and teaching. The deeper and more tragic view of the state of man has commended itself to the Teutonic mind, and the depth of the moral taint in the natural man has been estimated according to the Biblical standard. It is not only theologians among the Northern races who have been thus affected. The higher imaginative literature of England gives the same impression; and in our own day Browning, our greatest poet, has emphasised his acceptance of the Augustinian view of human nature by making its teaching as to original sin a proof of the truth of Christianity.[33] At the end of his poem "Gold Hair: a Story of Pornic," in which he tells how a girl of angelic beauty, and of angelic purity of nature as was supposed, is found after her death to have sold her soul to the most gruesome avarice, he says:-- "The candid incline to surmise of late That the Christian faith may be false, I find; For our Essays and Reviews' debate Begins to tell on the public mind, And Colenso's words have weight: I still, to suppose it true, for my part, See reasons and reasons; this, to begin: 'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie--taught original sin, The corruption of man's heart." [33] Browning's _Poetical Works_, vol. vi., p. 69.