The tables in fact were turned: the prize of a cheerful temper on a candid survey of life was no longer with the pagan world.

The aesthetic charm of the catholic church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent and expressive in the better mind of man, her outward comeliness, her dignifying convictions about human nature:--all this, as abundantly realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in the middle age--we may see already, in dim anticipation, in those charmed moments towards the end of the second century.

Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake of Marcus Aurelius himself, for a brief space of time we may discern that influence clearly predominant there.

What might seem harsh as dogma was already justifying itself as worship; according to the sound rule: Lex orandi, lex credendi--Our Creeds are but the brief abstract of our prayer and song.
The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her wholly unparalleled genius for worship, [124] being thus awake, she was rapidly re-organising both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the expanding therein of her own new heart of devotion.

Like the institutions of monasticism, like the Gothic style of architecture, the ritual system of the church, as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks as one of the great, conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary, products of human mind.