But in each case, as I have pointed out, it was the higher men who suffered. Because they alone had something to lose. The first notion --that of equality, threatened at once to make them doubt their own privileges and powers, to throw suspicion into the hearts of their followers, and to make all special, exceptional and isolated claims utterly void. The third--the insistence upon a truth which could be general and absolute, denied their right to establish their own truths in the hearts of men, and to rise above the most general truth which was reality; while in the second--the Semitic doctrine of general sin, which held that man was not only an imperfect, but also a fallen being, and that all his kind shared in this shame--there was not alone the ring of an absence of rank, but also of a universal depreciation of human nature which was ultimately to lead, by gradual stages, from a disbelief in man himself to a disbelief in nobles, in kings and finally in gods.[18] At one stroke, not one or two human actions, but all human performances, inspirations and happy thoughts, had been stripped of their glory and condemned. Man could raise himself only by God's grace --that is to say, by a miracle, otherwise he was but a fallen angel, aimlessly beating the air with his broken wings. These three blows levelled at the head of higher men were fatal to the artist; for it is precisely in the value of human inspirations, in the efficiency of human creativeness, and in the irresistible power of human will, that he, above all, must and does believe. It is his mission to demand obedience and to procure reverence; for, as we shall see, every artist worthy the name is at heart a despot.[19] Fortunately, the Holy Catholic Church intervened, and by its rigorous discipline and its firm establishment upon a hierarchical principle, suppressed for a while the overweening temper of the Christian soul, and all claims of individual thought and judgment, while it also recognized an order of rank among men; but the three doctrines above described remained notwithstanding at the core of the Christian Faith, and awaited only a favourable opportunity to burst forth and blight all the good that the Church had done. This favourable opportunity occurred in the person of Martin Luther. The Reformation, in addition to reinstating, with all their evil consequences, the three doctrines mentioned above, also produced a certain contempt for lofty things and an importunate individualism which has done nought but increase and spread from that day to this.