eness in some of the results: and amongst
these results would be the prevailing cast of thinking, and therefore to
some extent the prevailing features of style. It may seem strange to
affirm any affinities between the arid forms of Scholastic style and the
free movement of the early Grecian style. They seem rather to be
repelling extremes. But extremes meet more often than is supposed. And
there really _are_ some remarkable features of conformity even as to
this point between the tendencies of Christian monachism and the
unsocial sociality of Paganism. However, it is not with this view that
we have pressed the parallel. Not by way of showing a general affinity
in virtues and latent powers, and thence deducing a probable affinity in
results, but generally for the sake of fixing and illustrating
circumstances which made it _physically_ impossible that the movement
could have been translated by contagion from one country to the others.
Roads were too bad, cities too difficult of access, travellers too rare,
books too incapable of transmission, for any solution which should
explain the chain of coincidences into a chain of natural causations.
No; the solution was, that Christianity had everywhere gone ahead
spontaneously with the same crying necessities for purification, that
is, for progress. One deep, from North to South, called to another; but
the deeps all alike, each separately for itself, were ready with their
voices, ready without collusion to hear and to reverberate the cry to
God. The light, which abides and lodges in Christianity, had everywhere,
by measured steps and by unborrowed strength, kindled into mortal
antagonism with the darkness which had gathered over Christianity from
human corruptions. But in science this result is even more conspicuous.
Not only by their powers and energies the parallel currents of science
in different lands enter into emulations that secure a general
uniformity of progress, run neck and neck against each other, so as to
arrive at any killing rasper of a difficulty pretty nearly about the
same time; not only do they thus make it probable that coincidences of
victory will continually occur through the rivalships of power; but also
through the rivalships of weakness. Most naturally for the same reason
that they worshipped in spirit and in truth, for the same reason that
led them to value such a worship, they valued its distant fountain-head.
Hence their interest in the Messiah. Hence th