in the dust before God.  The Semites declared that man was created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while conscious of the power of the numina we confronted them boldly, and were ready to resist them.  The Indian legends, and those of the Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of conflicts between gods and men.  The demi-gods must be remembered, showing that the Aryans believed themselves to be sufficiently noble and great for the gods to love them, and to intermarry with them.  Thus the Aryan made himself into a God, and often took a glorious place in Olympus, while he declared that God was made man.

“We might imagine that the doctrine of God incarnate would be as repugnant to the ideas, feelings, and intellect of the Aryan as it was to the Semitic race.  But the anthropomorphic side of Christianity was readily embraced by the former as a mythical and aesthetic conception, and indeed it was they who made a metaphorical expression into an essential dogma:  the pride natural to the Aryan race made them eager to accept a religion which placed man in a still higher Olympus:  a belief in Christ was rapidly diffused, not as God but as the Man-God.  These are the true reasons, not only for the rapid spread of Christianity in Europe, but also for the philosophic systems of the Platonists and Alexandrines which preceded it.  Although Philo was a Hebrew, and probably knew nothing of Christ, he attained by means of Hellenism to the idea of the Man-God; the Platonic Word, which was merely the projection of God into human reason, was accepted for the same reason as the Christian dogma of the Word made man.

“Let us see what new principles, what higher morality and civilization were added by the diffusion of Christianity to those principles which were the spontaneous product of the race.  We must first consider what part the pagan gods, as they were regarded by educated men, played in the history of the European race, with respect to the individual and to the commonwealth.  The pagan Olympus, considered as a whole, and without reference to the various forms which it assumed in different peoples, was not essentially distinct from human society.  Although the gods formed a higher order of immortal beings, they were mixed up with men in a thousand ways in practical life, and conformed to the ways of humanity; they were constantly occupied in doing good or ill to mortals; they were warmly interested in the disputes of men, taking part in the conflicts of persons, cities, and peoples; special divinities watched over men from the cradle to the grave, and they were loved or hated by the gods by reason of their family and race.  In short, the heavenly and earthly communities were so intermixed that the gods were only superior and immortal men.