o mythical ideas, which became
more vigorous in every successive age, until the time arrived when
reason, educated by a long course of exercise, was able to renew the
effort with greater authority and success. The common people gradually
became Christian, and so also did educated men, who thus added the
authority of the schools to a teaching accepted by the feelings and
innate inclination of the race, and hence followed the theological
development of Christian dogma.

"These new principles and beliefs, eventually accepted by all the
nations of Europe, both barbarous and civilized, not only brought to
perfection the religious intuition characteristic of the morality and
civilization of the race, but they produced a new and renovating power
in historical and social life. This fresh virtue consisted in the belief
in a power consubstantially divine and human. Although the pagan gods
were human in their extrinsic and intrinsic form, only differing from
mortals by their mighty privileges, yet they were personally distinct
from men, and while the acts of Olympus mingled with those of earth,
they had an habitation and destinies apart. But by the new dogma, the
one God who was a Spirit took on him the substance of man and was united
with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which
was generally accepted by our race. The divine nature was continually
imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was
incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the
temple of God. Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the
Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other
forms, God was no longer essentially distinguished from mankind in the
form of a number of concrete beings, but was spiritually infused into
men and acted through them. The Christian as man felt himself to be a
participator with God himself by a mystic intercourse. Since, therefore,
the human faculty was historically identical with the divine, and shared
in the spiritual work which was to effect the redemption of society,
this new and Christian civilization added daring, confidence, and virtue
to the natural energy of the race.

"Not many years elapsed before men ceased to contemplate the immediate
end of the world predicted by the first apostles and the Apocalypse;
they looked forward to a more distant future, and except in the case of
some particular sects, they applied the proph