"The turning-point," remarks Frances Power Cobbe, "between the old world and the new was the beginning of the Christian movement. The action upon human nature, which started on its new course, was the teaching and example of Christ. Christ was he who opened the age of endless progress. The old world grew from without, and was outwardly symmetric. The new one grows from within, and is not symmetric, nor ever will be; bearing in its heart the germ of an everlasting, unresting progress. The old world built its temples, hewed its statues, framed its philosophies, and wrote its glorious epics and dramas, so that nothing might evermore be added to them. The new world made its art, its philosophy, its poetry, all imperfect, yet instinct with a living spirit beyond the old. To the Parthenon not a stone could be added from the hour of its completion. To Milan and Cologne altar and chapel, statue and spire, will be added through the ages. Christ was not merely a moral reformer, inculcating pure ethics; not merely a religious reformer, clearing away old theological errors and teaching higher ideas of God. These things He was; but He might, for all we can tell, have been them both as fully, and yet have failed to be what He has actually been to our race. He might have taught the world better ethics and better theology, and yet have failed to infuse into it that new tide which has ever since coursed through its arteries and penetrated its minutest veins. What Christ has really done is beyond the kingdom of the intellect and its theologies; nay, even beyond the kingdom of the conscience and its recognition of duty. His work has been in that of the heart. He has transformed the law into the gospel. He has changed the bondage of the alien for the liberty of the sons of God. He has glorified virtue into holiness, religion into piety, and duty into love." His was "a religion," says Jeremy Taylor, "that taught men to be meek and humble, apt to receive injuries, but unapt to do any; a religion that gave countenance to the poor and pitiful, in a time when riches were adored, and ambition and pleasure had possessed the heart of all mankind; a religion that would change the face of things and the hearts of men, and break vile habits into gentleness and counsel." "Christianity has that in it," says Steele, in the Christian Hero, "which makes men pity, not scorn the wicked; and, by a beautiful kind of ignorance of themselves, think those wretches their equals." "Great and multiform," observes Lecky, in his History of European Morals,--summing up some of the results of Christianity,--"great and multiform have been the influences of Christian philanthropy. The high conception that has been formed of the sanctity of human life, the protection of infancy, the elevation and final emancipation of the slave classes, the suppression of barbarous games, the creation of a vast and multifarious organization of charity, and the education of the imagination by the Christian type, constituted together a movement of philanthropy which has never been paralleled or approached in the pagan world."