HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 189 



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, accord- 

 ing to the Pauline interpretation, which was generally 

 accepted by our race. The divine nature was con- 

 tinually 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, con- 

 fidence, 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 pro- 

 phecies which referred to the first generation of 



