od himself was made man, and lived among men. Such teaching was
offered to the people as a truth of consciousness rather than of dogma,
although it was afterwards preserved in a theological form by the
preaching of Paul, and the pagan mind was more affected by sentiment
than by reason. The unity of God was associated in their aesthetic
imagination with the earlier conception of the supreme Zeus, which now
took a more Semitic form, and Olympus was gloriously transformed into a
company of elect Christians and holy fathers of the new faith. A
confused sentiment as to the mystic union of peoples, who became
brothers in Christ, had a powerful effect on the imagination and the
heart, since they had already learned to regard the world as the
creation of one eternal Being. In the ardour of proselytism and of the
diffusion of the new creed, they hailed the historical transformation of
the earthly endeavour after temporal acquisitions and pleasures into a
providential preparation for the heavenly kingdom.

"In Christ, the incarnation of the supreme God, they beheld the
apotheosis of man, so acceptable to the Aryan race, since he thus became
the absolute ruler of the world and its fates. Ideas and sentiments, of
which the Semitic mind was incapable, and which were opposed to their
historical and intellectual development, moved and satisfied the Aryan
mind, and became associated as far as possible with the dogma and belief
to which the race had attained in their pagan civilization. Thus heaven,
dogma, and Christian rites assumed from the first a pagan form; and
while the original idols were repudiated in the zeal for new principles,
their common likeness was maintained by the imaginative power of the
race.

"In this way Christianity became popular, and the Semitic idea was
invested with pagan forms, in order to carry on the gradual and more
intimate spiritual transformation which is not yet terminated. Its
teaching was at first decidedly rejected and opposed by cultivated
minds, accustomed as the Greeks were with few exceptions to use their
reason. Among philosophers, the popular belief in a personal Olympus had
disappeared, and a more rational study of mankind did not allow them to
understand or comprehend a dogma which re-established anthropomorphism
under another aspect, so that this new and impious superstition became
the object of persecution. These were, however, mere exceptions, an
anticipation of the opposition of reason t