was her task, while elaborating the system of the
universe for which she stood, to teach and convert the new nations, to
spread a uniform Christian civilisation.

On the mere face of it it must seem strange that a religion which had
grown on foreign soil, out of foreign spiritual assumptions, should have
been accepted so readily and quickly by nations to whom it must have
been alien and unintelligible. The love of war and valour of the
Teutonic tribes and Christian asceticism were diametrically opposed
ideals, and very often their relationship was one of direct hostility. I
need only remind the reader of the contempt expressed for the chaplain
by Hagen (in the "Song of the Niebelungen"). On the other hand, the
ancient Celtic and Teutonic races shared one profound characteristic
with the Christian world, the consequences of which were sufficiently
far-reaching to raise the religion of Christ to the religion of Europe.
The characteristic common to the still uncultivated European spirit and
Christianity, and meaningless alike to the Asiatic barbarians, the Jews
of the Old Testament and the Greeks, was the importance which both
attached to the individual soul. Through the Christian religion this new
intuition which saw in the soul of man the highest of values, became the
centre and pivot of life and faith--a position to which even Plato, to
whom the objective, metaphysical idea was the essential, never attained.
It had been the most personal experience of Christ, and centuries after
his death the nations rediscovered it as their highest value. It
entitled Christianity to become the natural religion of Europe, and the
soul of its new system of civilisation. It formed the most complete
contrast to all Asiatic cults, Brahminism and Buddhism, a fact which,
since Schopenhauer, one is inclined to overlook. To the Indian, the soul
of man is not an entity; his consciousness is a republic, as it were,
composed of diverse spiritual principles and metaphysical forces which
are not centralised into an "I-centre," but exist impersonally, side by
side. This may be a great conception, but it is foreign to the feeling
of the citizen of Europe. To the latter the I, the soul, the
personality, is the pivot round which life turns. The evolution of the
European world-feeling is in the direction of the independent
development of all psychical forces and their fusion into a unity of
ever-increasing intimacy. New values will be created, but the fus