from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent
at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the
less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a
river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediaeval
Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin.

Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to
matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to
form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are
only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through
and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.

But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling
for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and
Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the
world, Creator and created.

'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any
man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which
John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above
the clouds.

Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the
world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through
the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly
existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the
eternal Kingdom.

While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its
downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth
flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of
earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the
Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.'

The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil;
and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms.

Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the
visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of
deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life,
animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his
landscape was absorbed by the gods.

To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as
far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of
spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation
between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the
heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant