adapt herself and gradually impute her own spirit. Not her Christian character, but the universally pagan side of her observances is the reason for the spread of this world-religion! her ideas, which are rooted in the Jewish as well as the Hellenic mind, knew, from the very first, how to raise themselves above the exclusiveness and niceties of nations and races, as above prejudices. How ever much we may admire this faculty of making themost divergent matters coalesce, we must, all the same, not overlook the contemptible side of this faculty—the astonishing coarseness and narrowness of her intellect during the time of the formation of the Church, which allowed her to rest content with any diet, and to digest opposites like pebbles.
71
‘’The Christian revenge on Rome.’’—Nothing perhaps is so tiresome as the sight of an ever-successful conqueror; throughout fully two centuries the world had become accustomed to seeing Rome subdue one nation after another, the circle was closed, all future seemed at an end, everything was organised with a view to aperpetual state of affairs; nay. when the empire put up buildings, it was done with a secret aspiration to "imperishable strength." We, who know but the "mela-choly of ruins," can barely understand that altogether different melancholy of the perpetual building operations, from which men tried to escape the best way they could,
