The Religions of Greece and Rome.  The beauty of nature, the charm of art, the genius of man, were idealized and deified in the Greek pantheon.  The divinity of law, organizing human society according to universal rules of justice, was the truth in the Roman religion.  The defect of the Greek theology was the absence of a central unity.  Its polytheism carried variety to the extreme of disorder and dissipation.  The centrifugal force, not being properly balanced by any centripetal power, inevitably ends in dissolution.  The defect of Roman worship was, that its oppressive rules ended in killing out life.  Law, in the form of a stiff external organization, produced moral death at last in Rome, as it had produced moral death in Judaea.

Now Christianity, though a monotheism, and a monotheism which has destroyed forever both polytheism and idolatry wherever it has gone, is not that of numerical unity.  The God of Christianity differs in this from the God of Judaism and Mohammedanism.  He is an infinite will; but he is more.  Christianity cognizes God as not only above nature and the soul, but also as in nature and in the soul.  Thus nature and the soul are made divine.  The Christian doctrine of the Trinity expresses this enlargement of the Jewish monotheism from a numerical to a moral unity.  The God of Christ is human in this respect, that he is conceived of in the image of man.  Man is essentially a unit through his will, in which lies the secret of personal identity.  But besides will he has intellect, by which he comes into communion with the universe; and affection, by which he comes into communion with his race.  Christianity conceives of God in the same way.  He is an omnipresent will as the Father, Creator, and Euler of all things.  He is the Word, or manifested Truth in the Son, manifested through all nature, manifested through all human life.  He is the Spirit, or inspiration of each individual soul.  So he is Father, Son, and Spirit, above all, through all, and in us all.  By this larger view of Deity Christianity was able to meet the wants of the Aryan races, in whom the polytheistic tendency is so strong.  That tendency was satisfied by this view of God immanent in nature and immanent in human life.

Judaism and Mohammedanism, with their more concrete monotheism, have not been able to convert the Aryan races.  Mohammedanism has never affected the mind of India, nor disturbed the ascendency of Brahmanism there.  And though it nominally possesses Persia, yet it holds it as a subject, not as a convert.  Persian Sufism is a proof of the utter discontent of the Aryan intellect with any monotheism of pure will.  Sufism is the mystic form of Mohammedanism, recognizing communion with God, and not merely submission, as being the essence of true religion.  During the long Mohammedan dominion in Turkey it has not penetrated the minds or won the love of the Greek races.  It is evident that Christianity succeeded in converting the Greeks and Romans by means of its larger view of the Deity, of which the doctrine of the Trinity, as it stands in the creeds, is a crude illogical expression.