into the cause of this remarkable fact.

"As soon as the teaching of Christ was adopted by those familiar with
Aryan civilization and opinions, an idea repugnant to Semitic
conceptions, and still unintelligible to that race, was evolved from
it--I mean the idea that the human Christ, the Son of God, was God
himself. The Semite holds that God is so far exalted above all creation,
so great and eternal in comparison with the littleness of the world and
of man, that God incarnate is not merely a blasphemy but an unmeaning
and absurd phrase. Such a dogma was therefore energetically repudiated,
and the Semitic race submitted to persecution and dispersal rather than
accept it. This is the real reason why Christianity has not been
received and will never be received by the Semitic race. When Mahomet
reorganized and perfected the Arab creed, he preserved intact the
Semitic principle of the absolute and incommunicable nature of God: the
Semitic religion has ever held that there is one God, and his prophet.

"On the other hand, Christianity was rapidly diffused among the Greek
and Latin peoples, and in all parts of Europe inhabited by our race:
even savages and barbarians accepted more or less frankly a doctrine
rejected by the Semites in whom it had its origin. Many and various
causes have been assigned for this rapid diffusion of the new doctrine,
and the old Greek and Latin fathers ascribed it to the fact that men's
minds had been naturally and providentially prepared for it. It was
attributed by others to the miseries and sufferings of the slave
population, and of the poor, who found a sweet illusion and comfort in
the Christian hope of a world beyond the grave. Some, again, suggest the
omnipotent will of a tyrant, or the extreme ignorance of the common and
barbarous people. Although all these causes had a partial effect, they
were secondary and accidental. The true and unique cause lay deeper, in
the intellectual constitution of the race to which Christianity was
preached; just as physiological characteristics are reproduced in the
species until they become permanent, so do intellectual inclinations
become engrained in the nature.

"We have said that our race is aesthetically more mythological than all
others. If we consider the religious teaching of various Aryan peoples,
from the most primitive Vedic idolatry to the successive religions of
Brahma and Zend, of the Celts, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and Slavs, we
shall see how