“These new principles and beliefs, eventually accepted by all the nations of Europe, both barbarous and civilized, not only brought to perfection the religious intuition characteristic of the morality and civilization of the race, but they produced a new and renovating power in historical and social life.  This fresh virtue consisted in the belief in a power consubstantially divine and human.  Although the pagan gods were human in their extrinsic and intrinsic form, only differing from mortals by their mighty privileges, yet they were personally distinct from men, and while the acts of Olympus mingled with those of earth, they had an habitation and destinies apart.  But by the new dogma, the one God who was a Spirit took on him the substance of man and was united with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which was generally accepted by our race.  The divine nature was continually imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the temple of God.  Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other forms, God was no longer essentially distinguished from mankind in the form of a number of concrete beings, but was spiritually infused into men and acted through them.  The Christian as man felt himself to be a participator with God himself by a mystic intercourse.  Since, therefore, the human faculty was historically identical with the divine, and shared in the spiritual work which was to effect the redemption of society, this new and Christian civilization added daring, confidence, and virtue to the natural energy of the race.

“Not many years elapsed before men ceased to contemplate the immediate end of the world predicted by the first apostles and the Apocalypse; they looked forward to a more distant future, and except in the case of some particular sects, they applied the prophecies which referred to the first generation of Christians to the future history of the race.  It was therefore Christianity which introduced into the consciousness of our Aryan peoples the principles of a divine historic power acting on the social economy of mankind, and in this way the natural dignity and enterprising pride of the race was increased.  Through this fresh religious intuition and spiritual exaltation, the purity and moral sweetness of the Semitic Nazarene became the law of society, and the church organization gradually assimilated everything to itself, and received divine worship in the person of the supreme Pontiff, who continued for many ages to be the temporal ruler of consciences, of public institutions, and of civilization.  Strange daring in a race which from its early beginnings down to our own days has been always true to its own character, and in one form or other has displayed vigour, energy, ambition, transforming power, and great designs.