“The idea of Christianity arose in the midst of the Semitic people through him whose name it bears, and who perfected the religious idea of his nation.  This idea, in its Semitic simplicity, consisted in a belief in the existence of one, eternal, infinite God, the immediate creator of all things; it included the tradition of man’s loss of his original felicity, and the promise of a restoration of all peoples, and of the Israelites in particular, to their former condition of earthly happiness.  Christ appeared, and while he upheld the Mosaic law and its original idea, he declared himself to be the promised deliverer, sent of God; the Son of God, which among the Semitic people was the term applied to their prophets.  His moral teaching gave a more perfect form to the old law, and by his example he afforded a model of human virtue worthy of all veneration; the germs of a marvellous civilization were to be found in his moral and partially new teaching.  The same doctrine had been, to some extent, inculcated by the Jewish teachers, and the schools of Hillel and Gamaliel were certainly not morally inferior to his own, as we learn from the tradition of the Talmud, and from some passages in the Acts of the Apostles.  The origin, development, and teaching of primitive Christianity were therefore essentially Semitic, since it had its origin in a people of that race, and in a man of that people.  Yet the Semitic race did not become Christian; and, after so many ages have elapsed, it still rejects Christianity.  It was the Aryan race, to which we Europeans belong, which adopted this teaching and became essentially Christian, although this race is psychologically the most idolatrous of the world, as far as the aesthetic idol—­not the common fetish—­is concerned.  Let us inquire 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.