us from the Jews, through the Christian Church. This
does not mean that the Christian body of doctrine is as
a whole an oriental product. Rather should it be said
that a great part of the Christian theology is an appro-
priation of Greek philosophy. And many of those
popular beliefs which seem to us characteristically
"Christian," such as the belief in immortality, were,
in much the same setting that they have for us today,
an established possession of the earlier Greek thought.
Yet the borrowing from the Greeks took place at a time
when the Greek thought was itself strongly infected
with oriental ideas. And in any case I think that the
conception of brotherly love, with the point of view
and feeling-attitude which it implies, may be regarded
as a distinctively Christian product.

§ 102. As such it expresses a mental attitude typically
oriental. That is to say, it aims, not to organize, but to
dissolve all the differences created, on the one hand by
economic conditions, and on the other hand by varieties
of individual taste, interest, and opinion, into one all-
absorbing unity of feeling. Or I may express the same
thing by saying that it aims to conceive all the relations
of men as intimately personal. Here, however, I use
the term "personal" in its special and more popular
sense. For even from our own point of view the ideal
social relation is a personal relation. Yet for us this
personal relation is the final coordination, in final dis-
tinctness, of individual interests. In the popular use
of the term this element of distinctness is rather expressly
ignored. "A personal matter," or "a matter of personal
feeling" is something to be accepted and not to be further
analyzed or understood; in like manner a personal rela-
tion is one to which the question of debit and credit no
longer applies. It is in this sense that the Hebrew-

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