was more affected by sentiment than by reason.  The unity of God was associated in their aesthetic imagination with the earlier conception of the supreme Zeus, which now took a more Semitic form, and Olympus was gloriously transformed into a company of elect Christians and holy fathers of the new faith.  A confused sentiment as to the mystic union of peoples, who became brothers in Christ, had a powerful effect on the imagination and the heart, since they had already learned to regard the world as the creation of one eternal Being.  In the ardour of proselytism and of the diffusion of the new creed, they hailed the historical transformation of the earthly endeavour after temporal acquisitions and pleasures into a providential preparation for the heavenly kingdom.

“In Christ, the incarnation of the supreme God, they beheld the apotheosis of man, so acceptable to the Aryan race, since he thus became the absolute ruler of the world and its fates.  Ideas and sentiments, of which the Semitic mind was incapable, and which were opposed to their historical and intellectual development, moved and satisfied the Aryan mind, and became associated as far as possible with the dogma and belief to which the race had attained in their pagan civilization.  Thus heaven, dogma, and Christian rites assumed from the first a pagan form; and while the original idols were repudiated in the zeal for new principles, their common likeness was maintained by the imaginative power of the race.

“In this way Christianity became popular, and the Semitic idea was invested with pagan forms, in order to carry on the gradual and more intimate spiritual transformation which is not yet terminated.  Its teaching was at first decidedly rejected and opposed by cultivated minds, accustomed as the Greeks were with few exceptions to use their reason.  Among philosophers, the popular belief in a personal Olympus had disappeared, and a more rational study of mankind did not allow them to understand or comprehend a dogma which re-established anthropomorphism under another aspect, so that this new and impious superstition became the object of persecution.  These were, however, mere exceptions, an anticipation of the opposition of reason to 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.