The better heathenisms at their height were religions of life. This was the source of their greatest power. The chief causes of their fall proceeded from the inevitable limitations of that life which alone they were able to express and uphold. It was divided into many separate and exclusive lives. It was a fluctuating and transitory life, dependent solely on the human emotions which it should have sustained, and therefore itself subject to the same encroachments from without and from below which struck them sick and killed them. It was a life confined within the sphere of emotion, and therefore incapable of progress. It was divided from knowledge, and therefore knowledge was able to bear a part in destroying it. Its chief influence over action was by way of restraint. It was a life which sought satisfaction within the confines of the present, and so could often dispense with hope, though it could not annihilate fear. But these limitations do not set aside the fact that life itself was once the glory of heathenism.

In time the heathen world for the most part ceased to possess life, or to care for it. The sense of life had always been accompanied by pleasure and now, for nearly all, it was only pleasure that remained behind in the vacant place of life. Death, which it had once been possible to hide or forget in the strength of life, refused to be hidden or forgotten any longer.