The memory of the figure and preaching of Christ had so powerfully influenced the centuries that it had gradually permeated and transformed not only the Platonic doctrine of ideas—­that maturest fruit of Greek wisdom—­but also the Semitic mediaeval monotheism.  Something new had sprung into being, something which expressed a hitherto unknown feeling for life and for humanity, vague and uncertain in the beginning, but growing in clearness and uniformity.  On the throne of the Roman emperors sat a bishop, whose power was increasing with the development of the new civilisation, and whom the final victory of the new transcendental world-principle had made master of the world.  The building up of this new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy.  The reward was great.  For the first time in the annals of the world the questionings of brooding intelligence were fully answered, the anguish of the tortured soul was stilled.  The purpose of the universe, the destiny of man, were comprehended and interpreted, good and evil being finally known.  At the close of the first Christian millenary, all moral and intellectual values were grouped round and dominated by one supreme ideal; the loftiest value in this world and the next, side by side with the greatest secular power, were in the hands of the Church; together with the imperium she had succeeded to the spiritual and ethical inheritance of the dead civilisations.  Without her uncouth barbarism reigned, and it 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