Thanks to that destiny, the type must have been enriched retrospectively with features which can be interpreted only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda That strange and morbid world into which the gospels lead us a world which seems to have been drawn from a Russian novel, where the scum and dross of society, diseases of the nerves and childish imbecility seem to have given each other rendezvous must in any case have coarsened the type: the first disciples especially must have translated an existence conceived entirely in symbols and abstractions into their own crudities, in order at least to be able to understand something about it, for them the type existed only after it had been cast in a more familiar mould.