61. As mentioned before, the release of the creative principle takes place through rhythms or impulses appearing at certain intervals. The last great impulse of this kind for terrestrial mankind was of such a nature that it slowly split up into three lesser impulses, each of which in turn gave rise to a religion. Because each of these religions aimed at being propagated to all people, they are called "world religions" as distinct from those existing before which were more in the form of "national religions" or "faiths", each aimed at a particular people, nation or State. Of those three world religions, which in the form of "Buddhism", "Islam" and "Christianity" have carried development of the Creative Principle forward to our day, Christianity became the off-shoot through which the continuing new world impulse could be realized, and which will now unite all races on Earth. This off-shoot of the old world impulse has spread out to the western lands and peoples, and by its fusion with the all-prevailing dark radiation from the Creative Principle, or the "power of the sword", it crystallized into a definite form. Under this form it was possible to invest the pure light impulse with such adaptability and sharpness that it was able to drive through the armour of darkness which represented the concept of sound reason and justice held by the West's uncivilized barbarians at that time. When a fine hand does coarse work, gradually a protective layer of hard skin is formed on the over-exerted parts; just such laws are also valid in spiritual areas, so in this case we must imagine the old world impulse as the fine divine hand. This "hand's" contact with coarse barbarianism produced a "hard skin" which guaranteed its suitability for constantly dealing with barbarism and undermining it as a result. The protective "skin" of the old world impulse is identical with that reality known over the whole of the western world as "Catholicism". This will not be difficult to understand when one takes into consideration that people in the West were still governed by the Creative Principle's dark radiation to such a degree that their greatest heroism was by the use of the sword, by revenge and by conquering and plundering other states and countries, while the condition for their place in the Light after death was directly stipulated to be not by dying a natural death from old age - but by being slain by the sword. Confronted with such a totally dark state of consciousness and such concepts of reason and justice, the pure, light world impulse with its diametrically opposing ideas, its prohibition of revenge, its teaching to give rather than to take, to love one's enemies and to turn the right cheek when struck on the left, could not possibly be acceptable as ideal or rational, if they had not been combined with much of those primitive people's own habitual concepts, for instance the sanction to use physical strength.