A Critique of Professor Arnold G. Toynbee’s Understanding — Page 10
10 vitality. In their place, Caesarism had come as a living cult. The worship of the state as personified by the reigning Caesar, such was the religion of the Roman Empire. When Christianity conquered Caesarism at the commencement of the fourth century, it, i n its turn, became Caesdrised. No longer was it the pure creed which had been taught some three centuries before. It had become largely de - spiritualised, ritualized, and materialized. …. . How, in a few years, all this was changed, how, by 650 AD a great part of this world became a different world from what it had been before, is one of the most remarkable chapters in human history …. This wonderful change followed, if it was not mainly caus ed by, the life of one man, the Prophet of Mecca …. Whatever the opinion one may have of this extraordinary man, whether it be that of the devout Muslim who considers him the last and greatest herald of God’s word, or of the fanatical Christian of former d ays, who considered him an emissary of the Evil One, or of certain modern Orientalists, who look on him rather as a politician than a saint, as an organizer of Asia in general and Arabia in particular, against Europe, rather than as a religious reformer; t here can be no difference as to the immensity of the effect which his life has had on the history of the world. To those of us, to whom the man is everything, the milieu but little, he is the supreme instance of what can be done by one man. Even others, wh o hold that the conditions of time and place, the surroundings of every sort, the capacity of receptivity of the