"Newton had merely tried to demote Egypt in relation to Christianity; he did not try to raise Greece. By the middle of the 18th century, however, a number of Christian apologists were using the emerging paradigm of progress’, with its presupposition that ‘later is better’, to promote the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians. These strands of thought soon merged with two others that were becoming dominant at the same time: racism and Romanticism."