Only here in Rome is it possible to realize the long struggle for supremacy between the European and Semitic ideas; for here is gathered the bulk of the relics of Greece--mother and nurse of our race--who early broke the bonds of Asiatic thought and sought her own development, material rather than spiritual (if one accepts the theory that spirit and matter are divisible), sensuous rather than mystical, concerned more with the well-being of the body and the freedom and vigour of the mind than with the condition of the soul. She who threw herself with passion into the arms of Nature, and worshipped only the sublimated human characteristics and visible natural forces deified into exquisite personifications. She who exalted the beauty and health of the body into a cult, strove after the demonstrable truths of science, and loved man as he was--humorously loved him with all his faults and limitations, rather than an impossible ideal of him. Here in Rome one finds all the records of the next great development of the European Erd-geist--the growth of its genius in military, social, and political organization. Still, as in Greece, clinging to the aristocratic ideal; to the rule of the strong and gifted. The fruit did not exist for the benefit of the vine; the vine existed to produce, to nourish, to minister to the perfect culmination of its species in the fruit, which drank its sap as of right. Here again the European followed Nature, that Arch-Aristocrat who destroys multitudes to produce a few perfect specimens--whose right is always might. The Asian conquests brought again inroads of Asian thought; more particularly the thought of that small tribe, the quintessential of Semitism, which was ever engaged in revolt against nature, and maintaining democratic convictions in the teeth of all experience. Impatient of rulers, but submissive to those who scourged the impulses of their appetites. Scornful of kings, and turning from beauty and genius to exalt the insane and insect-ridden fakir with knotted unshorn locks who muttered vague prophecies. Struggling always to escape from the grip of the inevitable cruelties of natural forces by opposing to them bloody sacrifices and cruel self-restraints--flowering at last into that supreme incarnation of the Semitic mind called Jesus Christ, who wrested from asceticism a dream of a panacea for the brutalities of the laws of life. The misshapen and undeveloped fruit of the tree of existence, the windfalls--always a vast majority--received with ecstasy this new gospel, absurd but fascinating, which denied actualities and promised impossibilities. The feeble majority clutched at a power denied them by nature, and only by outwardly accepting the new tenets were the strong few able to maintain their old dominance.