186 MYTH AXD SCIENCE. 



anything to do with the government of the world. 

 According to the teaching of the Stoics, which was very 

 generally diffused, man was supposed to be so far left 

 to himself that he was the creator of his own virtue, 

 and had to struggle, not only against nature and his 

 fellow-man, but against fate, the underlying essence 

 of every cosmic form and motion. If this pagan 

 rationalism gave rise to great theoretic morality, 

 and produced amazing examples of private and public 

 virtue, it had little effect on the multitudes, nor did it 

 contain any guiding principle for the historical life of 

 humanity as a whole. 



"Christianity proclaimed the spiritual unity of 

 God, the unity of the race, the brotherhood of all 

 peoples, the redemption of the world, and consequently 

 a providential influence on mankind. Christianity 

 taught that God himself was made man, and lived 

 among men. Such teaching was offered to the 

 people as a truth of consciousness rather than of 

 dogma, although it was afterwards preserved in a 

 theological form by the preaching of Paul, and the 

 pagan mind 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 



