But antagonistic as these philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in common.

The popular belief that the world of man's normal experience is the Alpha and Omega of _Nature_, is the very platform on which their controversies are carried on.

Were any one to suggest to them that this belief was without foundation, that there was room and to spare in Nature for the "supernatural" as well as for the normal, that the supernatural world (as it had long been miscalled) was nothing more nor less than "la continuation occulte de la Nature infinie,"-- they would at once unite their forces against him, and assail him with an even bitterer hatred than that which animates them in their own intestine strife.
The dualistic philosophy which satisfied the needs of the West for some fifteen centuries was systematised and formulated for it, in the language of myth and poetry, by an Eastern people.

The acceptance of official Christianity by the Graeco-Roman world was the result of many causes, two of which stand out as central and supreme.

The first of these was the personal magnetism of Christ, in and through which men came in contact with, and responded to, the attractive forces of those moral and spiritual ideas which Christ set before his followers.