The introduction of Christianity into Greece is associated with the name of a Jew, St. Paul, just as the introduction of the Dionysiac mysteries is with that of the Thracian Orpheus. It is a divine seed come forth from the East, after an interval of fifteen centuries, and developing in the fructifying rays of the sun of Greece. But Christianity, although it represents the last phase of the progressive invasion of the West by oriental beliefs, is an original religion and not a heresy of Judaism. Far from being the supplement of the Jewish faith, we might rather call it its denial. The dominant note of Judaism is the attitude at which it places the conception of the Divine; between man and his God the distance is infinite. Christianity, on the contrary, had for its fundamental dogma the worship of the God-man. The Jewish religion, alone of all the religions of the earth, confined itself absolutely to this present life, without following man beyond the limits of his earthly destiny; to Christianity the earth is but a temporary place of trial, and life a preparation for eternity. The Jewish nation prides itself on the exclusive inheritance of the Law and casts forth the multitude of the uncircumcised from its midst; while Christianity proclaimed itself the universal religion from the beginning, and has never ceased to call men of all nations to itself. The Christians borrowed nothing from Judea but its traditions and its legends; had they rested satisfied with these, they would have been no more than a small Jewish sect that would have passed away unnoted. Judaism is one of the tributaries of the great Christian river, but it is not its principal source. In its apotheosis of humanity Christianity has a direct link with Hellenism, of which it is the legitimate successor. The doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, all have their source in the most ancient beliefs of Indo-European peoples; which explains why the Jews so obstinately hold aloof from it. The true heir of Jewish thought is Islamism, the modern religion of the Semitic race. By depriving Christianity of its Greek elements, by setting aside the idea of the incarnation of the Divine in humanity, which spanned the gulf between God and man, Mohammed restored Semitic monotheism to its pristine severity, tempered only by belief in the devil and in a future life, which the Jews themselves had ended by accepting. [Sidenote: [37-41 A.D.]]