HISTOEICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 187 



Christ, bad 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 pre- 

 paration 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 senti- 

 ments, 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 re- 

 pudiated 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 op- 

 posed by cultivated minds, accustomed as the Greeks 



