4. TENDENCIES IN THE RELIGIOUS WORLD OF THE FIRST CENTURY A.D.
It remains, before we come to the story of the new religion, to note some of the tendencies at work, when it appeared, in the old religions whose leading features we have surveyed. The new religion came into existence on the morrow of a political revolution whose effect was world-wide, the transformation into a personal autocracy of the oligarchy which, through the power of Rome, controlled civilisation. That revolution was itself the last of a succession which, through nearly three centuries, had slowly changed the main conditions of social life, and in changing these had influenced the religious ideas and practices of a whole world. In those three hundred years there had been at work a continuous steady pressure working towards the political unity of civilisation, and destroying, as it progressed, the multitudinous barriers to freedom of thought and intercourse which the rivalry of a hundred states and cultures had thrown up in sheer self-defence. It had worked most powerfully for a more generous philosophical conception of man's relation to his fellows, and had even given the beginnings of a setting of fact to such philosophical theories as that of the universal brotherhood of men. This gentle and more generous spirit passed from the philosophers to the very citadel of particularism and privilege -- the law, and the revolution was reflected in the first western legislation that can truly be called social.
And, it needs no stating, this new force, bred of a new political and social unity, influenced no less strikingly the traditional notions of religion. For the intellectuals of Paganism there was that new thing the moral philosophy of the Stoics; and while some turned in desperation from the critic-riddled mythologies to the despair of scepticism, the neo-Pythagorean philosophies with their teaching of a divine providence and their liturgy of healing and purification attracted others. In this pagan elite we have the spectacle of a doctrinal enthusiasm reflected in, and influenced by, every form of intellectual activity, seeking restlessly but untiringly a system which will satisfy both intellect and heart. One of the most striking examples perhaps of this coincident doubt and desire, of the prevalent alternation of credulity and scepticism is Cicero. Cicero, conservative and respectful to tradition -- no embittered liberal in revolt like Lucretius -- who, in one mood, invoking his genius to move the people to gratitude for Jove's safeguarding of Rome can speak as a theologian, appears in quite another guise in his philosophical writings and his private correspondence. Do the gods exist? The question, self-found, he proceeds to discuss it. "No doubt it is hard to say 'no', if the matter is discussed in a public reunion. Amongst ourselves. . . nothing easier than to say 'no.' I am myself one of the pontiffs. I really believe we ought to preserve with jealous devotion all the ceremonial of the public cult. For all that, I should like to be able to prove to myself that the gods do exist, not the mere likelihood of their existence but to prove it as a certainty. I have so many difficulties troubling me in this matter that sometimes I come to think that really there are no gods." The like interest, the same anxious desire, finds an echo in all that was best in the literature of the time. Virgil, Plutarch, and Seneca most of all, reflect it in a kind of continuous ground rhythm that once in a while rising to the surface swells their genius to its full.
What of the crowd, the vast mass of Pagans? Here, too, the new spirit of brotherhood showed itself in the innumerable associations -- collegia -- for mutual assistance.
We note, too, the decline of certain cults. But the traditional paganism survives, still a force if only in the weight of its inertia. Especially does it survive in the local cults, the worship of the special protecting gods of the town, of the professions and trades and of the family, and in the cult of the dead. Local patriotism is here their inspiration, and their ritual observances become a matter of civic duty -- a reflection in religious matters of the rich and varied municipal life that was for so long the Empire's main strength; and the obligation of worship presses universally on every citizen. Even the elite who find their spiritual salvation in far different ways bow in practice to the prevailing spirit; and Seneca can end a devastating criticism of the cult of the gods of the Capitol with the practical recommendation that every wise man will worship them, not that this pleases the gods, but because it is commanded by the law.
And this traditional paganism remained for the mass of its clients substantially the same, anthropomorphic, a hero-worship, a magical cult, undoctrinal, unmoral, idolatrous. Philosophers might, by allegorising, seek to refine and purify it; they might give the myths a higher meaning through symbolic interpretations. But philosophers are rare. The average man has his bread to earn and lacking the time, if not the aptitude, for speculation, gives himself generally to the practice of life as he finds his fellows practising it. Hence polytheism survives the criticism of the thinkers, and the myths their ridicule; and idolatry remains so widespread, so universal a fact of life, that the pagan elite can mock at it as unsparingly as the later Christian Fathers. And with the universal idolatry there still flourished the old superstition and the old obscenity which the idolatry preached, only too often, from a hundred divine examples. "I am well aware," the words are those of a pagan, Denis of Halicarnassus, "that many philosophers explain allegorically the greater part of these filthy fables. But this philosophy is the possession of a very few only. The mass of mankind, the ordinary folk, accept the stories in their worst sense. Either they despise gods whose lives are so depraved, or, since the gods themselves are shown not to abstain from them, they come to the pitch that they do not recoil from the very vilest of vicious deeds." It is not unfair to say that the survival of this old classic paganism was due "in great part to the feebleness of its control over moral conduct, character and the passions, to the sanction it gave to every surrender to the beast that sleeps, alas, at the heart of each one of us."
Paganism's idea of God had in it no element of grandeur, of holiness, of sanctity; and in its practice, adoration and love could find no place. It was in fact little but a mentality, an attitude of mind which went with a certain routine of ritual. Though it accompanied every action of life, it did so only as an empty gesture, barren of influence, powerless to affect life itself or thought. Nevertheless the founder of the new political regime, Augustus, saw in it a means of control, a source of power, which, patronised, fostered, protected by the state, might become, because of its universal diffusion through the vast empire of so many races and tongues, a permanent reserve of support. Hence his vigorous and continued attempts to restore and reform it; his rich endowment of its temples; and his own public assiduity, and that of his successors, in the observance of its rites. There is attributed to one of his counsellors, Maecenas, a speech which sums up the new state policy in religious matters "Honour the gods according to the customs of your forefathers, see to it that others honour them too. As for those who would introduce among you any strange novelties of religion, hate them and let them feel your hatred. . . ." Such novelties there were indeed to be, for underneath the universal state-protected Hellenistic Paganism the old cults of Egypt and the East were once more slowly stirring. With their ideas of spiritual purification, of redemption from sin, and of personal immortality, expressed in a ritual incomparably seductive, these cults were later to do much to transform, yet once more, the religion of the populace; but for yet another century they were to-move only very slowly, their influence as yet hardly felt outside the underworld of the great cities of the East. Of greater immediate importance, in the first century A.D., was the new cult of the State itself, now in course of slow transformation to a worship of the reigning Emperor, and rapidly becoming the most popular cult of all.
Emperor worship was not a Roman invention. It appears, long before Rome was a power, in ancient Egypt, and it was sufficiently widespread throughout the East for Alexander to use it as a means of consolidating his conquests. The generals, who on his death divided up his Empire among themselves, took the practice as part of the legacy and it was already an established tradition when, in turn, these kingdoms fell before the Roman power. Roman philosophy, associating immortality with the great heroes of humanity -- an immortality they shared with the gods -- may have prepared the way in the west. For the hero lives for ever with the gods, soon he comes to be likened to them, to be considered after death as one of them. But once more it is in the east that the beginnings are to be found, in the cult there rendered to the different generals and proconsuls. Thus at the beginning of the second century Flaminius, the conqueror of the Macedonians, is associated in 196 at Chalcis with the cult of Herakles and Apollo. A century later the custom is general and Cicero can cite a cult of Verres as a count in his famous indictment, and make it a boast that he himself refused the proffered divine honours during his proconsulship of Cilicia. The Civil War helped greatly in the development of the practice, and the assassination of Julius Caesar was the occasion of the first official divinisation, the law of 44 B.C. which decreed to the dead hero the title of "Divine." In the Civil Wars which filled the next few years the rival leaders generously appropriated to themselves like honours -- all but Octavian. With characteristic caution he waited until with his final victory the honours came to him more surely than if they had been self-conferred. The title of Augustus conferred by the Senate in 27 B.C. had in it already something of the divine, and soon there began at Rome a private cult of the Genius of Augustus. In the provinces progress was more rapid, and altars were erected even during his lifetime to Augustus himself, though at Rome itself it was not customary, for yet another century or more, so to deify the reigning sovereign.
With the emperor there was associated in the ritual the goddess Rome; and presently the two became confounded and, worshipping the emperor, the citizen worshipped his country. It was not merely in a spirit of servility and flattery that this new imperial cult originated and developed. Round it there clustered from the beginning a host of nobler associations. There was thankfulness for the peace and prosperity that succeeded a century of bloody civil war, appreciation of Augustus as the deliverer from an age of anarchy; there was something of the sentiment of pride of race, almost of patriotism; and in this cult all the popular veneration for the majesty of the State's power found a natural and congenial expression, until in the end it became the very touchstone of loyalty and good citizenship. It was of all cults the most popular; and, excelling all others in the pomp that surrounded its celebrations and in the prestige of its priesthood, more than any other it came to stand as the established religion of the State.
It is not, however, in the development of any one particular religion that the most characteristic feature of the religious life of this age is to be sought. More significant, and of ultimately greater importance, is the tendency of all these cults to amalgamate. The new political unity; Rome's new role as the capital of that new unity, the city where the vast Empire's innumerable religions were to meet and to live together, and through which as through a great clearing house of culture the hundred fashions of thought and life were to pass, and to return, refashioned, to the distant provinces; the quasi-official propaganda of the Roman religions; all fostered this new levelling tendency. Rome had conquered Carthage and Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and in turn those ancient civilisations, like some captive mistress, were to enslave their conqueror. The subject peoples brought with them into the Empire their gods as they brought their other cultural habits, and the strangers soon appeared in every city side by side with the native deities, sometimes in rivalry, sometimes roughly identified by a similarity of myth or an identity of divine function. Sometimes the different religions co-existed in a strange companionship that was unconscious of basic incompatibility, or again, combining, they gave rise to newer cults.
This tendency to assimilate and level the cults of the world, which was at work throughout the countries ringed around the Mediterranean Sea, began unmistakably to show itself after the conquests of Alexander. It developed with ever increasing vigour for the next four or five centuries. The nature of the pagan cults assisted the development. They lacked organisation, lacked a body of religious doctrine and consequently there was in them no place for anything corresponding to an Act of Faith. The clients of the different gods were not therefore "members" of the cults as a Christian is a "member" of his Church. Remembering also that Paganism's one obligation was observance of ritual, it is easy to understand the speedy development of this syncretist tendency. Nothing could have been more congenial to the nature of Paganism. But it would be erroneous to suppose that Syncretism made for greater simplicity, for a real unity that would take the place of the old confusing multiplicity of gods and cults. The final result of the movement was confusion greater than ever. It introduced new complexities, and, by its juxtaposition of gods, multiplying ever more and more the number of dwellers on Olympus, it made rather for polytheism more and more hopelessly. For the one Jupiter whom the ancient Roman knew, there were now, to the delight of the sceptic, half a dozen -- as often as not rivals -- to conciliate whom simultaneously called for considerable tact on the part of the pious. So for example Xenophon records how, on his return from Asia, he sacrificed in turn to Zeus Eleutherios and to Zeus Basileus. All in vain. Matters were rather worse than before. He learnt from one learned in such affairs that the jealousy of Zeus Meilichios was the obstacle, and hastening to propitiate the last, he finally received an answer to his prayers. Thanks to the syncretist development "Ideas become more indistinct; but no single idea of divinity clearly emerges. This theocrasia. . . did nothing for monotheism but a great deal for scepticism and the darkest superstitions."
In the six hundred years that lay between Nabuchodonosor's final destruction of their ancient kingdom and the coming of Christianity, the Jews had suffered under a series of political revolutions. Their Babylonian conquerors had fallen to the Persians, and the Persians to Alexander. Alexander's Greek successors had, by their attempted suppression of Judaism, roused a revolt that resulted in an independent Jewish state and finally this had fallen to the Romans. Each of the political systems under which the Jews had lived had left its mark on national characteristics, but none had effected a change equal to that which resulted from the years of exile that followed the conquest of Nabuchodonosor. The exiles were indeed allowed to return by the Persian who conquered Nabuchodonosor's hapless descendant, but the Jewry of post-exilic times was a new thing, and the restored national life was no mere resumption of the old.
Henceforth there were indeed to be two Jewries, for not all the exiles returned, and from the Babylonian captivity the historian has ever before him this dual development of the race and its religion. The colonies of those who chose permanently to exile themselves from Palestine were for the most part, originally, in the valley of the Euphrates the land of the captivity; but later, and especially in the years that followed the conquests and death of Alexander, it was the countries of the hellenic culture, more particularly Egypt, that attracted them and Alexandria itself became a second Jerusalem. With the Roman conquest of the East, and the consequent political unity of the whole Mediterranean world, the Jews spread into the Latin West. All the Mediterranean countries now knew them, as they themselves could boast. There was a colony of 10,000 (men alone) at Rome in the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37) and about the same time they are reckoned at one in seven of the population of Egypt. Harnack estimates that they formed 7 per cent. of the total population of the Empire in the reign of Augustus.
The Jewry of Palestine and that of the Dispersion are equally important in a study of Christian origins, for the Palestinian Jewry was the birthplace and cradle of the new religion, and the Jewry of the Dispersion was its first means of propaganda, the bridge by which it entered the world of Paganism outside Palestine. The two Jewries were greatly affected by every phase of contemporary religious development; they were affected in widely different ways. For the exiles who returned to Palestine, there had followed a full restoration of the forms of the pre-exilic religious life. Jerusalem was once again the Holy City, the Temple was rebuilt, and the prescribed routine of daily sacrifice and ritual prayers was resumed as though no calamity of war had ever interrupted it. The main effect upon this Jewry of the contact with the religions of their conquerors, had been to strengthen and confirm its own traditional faith. Especially were these Jews strengthened in their hold on the doctrine that Yahweh is God and is alone God. The old fight of the Prophets against idolatry is never again to need renewing. In none of the Prophets who follow the captivity is there any reference to it as a national sin. Yahweh is more clearly seen as the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, and if known in an especial manner to the Jews, knowable to the rest by His work of creation and His providence. More than ever is emphasis laid on the fact that He is the God of Holiness, of Justice in the moral sense, requiring in this an imitation of Himself in those He has created. The political catastrophe has served to emphasize that something more is required for future salvation than the mere fact of birth into the race of His choice.
Man is body and soul, is immortal, and around his relations with Yahweh his Creator, through the Law set for his observance, there now begins a whole world of new speculation and thought. Man's universal inclination to evil, his weakness in the presence of temptation to wrong-doing, are a legacy from the failure of the first of mankind, Adam. But the weakness is not fatal. An observance of the Law is possible and will ensure salvation. Observance of the Law is possible, but it is increasingly difficult; for one of the chief results of the exile has been a cult of the Law for its own sake, a cult that has gradually overlaid its first simple austerity with a mass of deduced precepts such that only the scholar trained in the Law can safely find his way through the mazes, and the Law begins to cover the minutest detail of all the myriad acts of life. To teach the law, to interpret it, there has gradually grown up the "corps" of the Scribes. They are an extra-levitical religious force, standing to the priesthood much as the new law cult stands to the Temple liturgy of sacrifice; and the foundation of their prestige is their service in the dark days of the captivity, when, deprived of that liturgy, Jewish piety was saved by study and meditation on the Divine Law.
This cult of the Law was now perhaps the chief force in the religious life of the Palestine Jewry, and in its most enthusiastic devotees developing ever more surely into a barren and exaggerated formalism. It was not, however, the only force in that life; and the Jew, torn between the consciousness of his own weakness and the austere fact of the well-nigh unobservable Law, about which the Scribes in their many schools disputed, turned for consolation and encouragement to the mercy of the Law's author. Since the captivity there had gradually developed the notion of an individual responsibility in spiritual matters, and along with this a sense of Yahweh’s providence as a quality by reason of which men, not merely in the mass, as a chosen nation, but even as individuals, were important and matter for the Divine Concern. Side by side with the cult of the Law there was a cult of the Psalms; and in the interior life thus fed and stimulated, the pious Jew escaped at once the deadening formalism of a merely external law observance, and the consequences of a fatal identification of the Divine Lawgiver with His unauthorised human commentators.
The role of the prophet diminished; and with the death of Malachi there began a long period of four centuries in which the Jew, while the different pagan empires disputed his kingdom among themselves, lived spiritually on the riches of his past, giving himself to the twin cults of the Law and the life of interior holiness and to meditation on the manner and the time of the next showing forth of Yahweh’s mercy -- the looked for coming of the Messias. Here speculation was rich and varied indeed, much of it stimulated and coloured by pagan motives of eschatology, and related almost always to the anticipated end of Yahweh’s earthly creation. Sometimes the coming of the promised Saviour is expected as coincident with the end of the world, as the judgment of Yahweh through him on His defeated enemies. Another school looked for the Saviour's reign as an earthly preliminary to the promised eternity of bliss. After his victory over Yahweh’s enemies, he will, as ruler of the world, transform it through justice and peace, judging mankind and allotting to each his punishment or reward. The wicked shall be punished for ever in flames, the good be received into paradise, a high place where they shall see Yahweh and rejoice with Him for ever. The Messias himself was conceived as a great prince to be sent by God to establish His kingdom on earth, as a warrior and judge, as the king who will reign eternally. Generally, too, he is conceived as already existing, awaiting the day of his coming; but he is never conceived as himself divine, nor did the general conception ever associate with his coming and the execution of his mission the idea of vicarious suffering and expiation.
For this Palestinian Judaism the conquests of Alexander were the beginning of much new development. The hellenistic culture which thereafter spread over all the semitic East could not leave it untouched. From Alexander himself, and from the Ptolemies to whom Palestine fell as a province on Alexander's death, their religious institutions had nothing but protection. But the victory of the dynasty of the Seleucid rulers of Antioch (198) brought about, with the change of ruler, the novelty of an aggressive movement on the part of the state to hellenise not merely the secular culture of the Jews but their religion also. The Jews were to syncretise Judaism at the order of the hellenic Paganism that was now their master. A national insurrection was the consequence; and after a series of bloody wars the Jews, under the heroic Judas Maccabeus, not only secured their threatened religious independence, but shook themselves free of the rule of the foreigner. The new political independence lasted for a century until, in 63 B.C., Jerusalem fell to Pompey's armies and Rome. It was a century of religious revival. The hellenistic influences of the pre-Maccabean generations did indeed survive, especially among the families of what may be called the ecclesiastical nobility, and those from whose ranks the leaders in public life were recruited. This was the party of the Sadducees, who reduced observance of the Law to the minimum of what was actually written, and rationalised, as far as they could, the ancient beliefs. Sadducees formed a tiny colony of Hellenism in the very heart of Jewry, controlling political life through their wealth and through their command of the high priesthood which money had brought them.
This attitude of compromise with the foreign culture was, however, the attitude of the few; and the mass of the nation followed rather the influence of those jealous doctors of the Law, the Scribes. Striving to keep themselves clear of the pagan culture's corrupting influence, they "separated" themselves from its every manifestation -- whence the later name by which they were called, and called themselves, Pharisees, the Separated. Their spiritual lineage was from the heroes who had formed the armies of Maccabeus, and the traditional religious patriotism of the sect won it a deep and constant influence with the mass of the Jews.
The Judaism of the Dispersion is best studied as it appeared in Alexandria its most influential centre, the second city of the Empire, the Metropolis of the East, the capital of the Dispersion, and for the Jew the second Jerusalem. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the fact of the Dispersion in the early history of the Catholic Church. From Antioch to Italy and through Gaul to Spain the chain of Jewish colonies spread, and it was around these islands of belief in the pagan sea that the first Christian groups were formed. Through the loosely federated colonies of the Dispersion the new religion was to find a material facility of propaganda such as no other religion could hope to possess. In the colonies of the Dispersion the Jews lived their own life. They did not intermarry with the surrounding Gentiles, and, careful of their traditional cult of morality, they habitually avoided the amusements that were the core of the pagan social life -- the theatres, the circus, the baths. They were exempt from the charge of public office as they were debarred from military service; and as members of a privileged religion their synagogues received protection and they themselves were judged according to their own law.
It was nevertheless, impossible for them to live entirely uninfluenced by their surroundings. They became Greek speaking, for example, and forgot their Hebrew to such an extent that it was necessary for their own use to have their sacred writings translated into Greek -- whence the Septuagint. With the new language they entered into contact with all the rich variety of the world's most gifted civilisation. Greece, its literature, its philosophy, its spirit of speculation on fundamental things, now lay open to the scholars and thinkers of the Dispersion. Were they to close their minds to the new influence, to shut it out as a thing necessarily accursed, in the fashion of many of their compatriots in Palestine? -- or was there not a means of conciliating what was good in it with their own traditions, and so of enlarging the sphere of their influence without surrendering what was vital to their faith? The thinkers of Alexandrian Judaism chose the latter alternative, and using Greek Philosophy to universalise the Law, strove to create an entente where the corrected philosophy and the Law, philosophically explained, should be seen as two aspects of the same unity. The Jewish faith remained the same thing, with its eternal foundations of monotheism and the personal immortality of the individual soul. The best of Greek philosophy accorded here with Jewish belief; and while the Jew accepted the philosophical allegorising of the Greek myths and fables that made of them merely a vehicle for the teaching of abstract truths, he was prepared, in the same accommodating spirit, to explain allegorically, the contents of his own sacred books. It is the idea hidden behind the fact that is the all-important thing; the fact related is secondary. Greek Philosophy thus becomes a religion, accepting the principle of the supernatural; Judaism, without ceasing to be a religion, will be a philosophy, "searching beneath the word revealed, the reasonable teaching it covers."
Religious ceremonial and liturgy lost much of their importance in this presentation of Judaism, except in so far as they were symbols of truth; the old notion of the true religion as meant exclusively for the chosen race disappears, and most important of all, the concept of the promised Saviour changes fundamentally. For these philosophically minded Jews it is no longer a warrior, judge or king, who is to restore the kingdom and wreak vengeance on the enemies of Yahweh, but a triumphant, all-conquering true doctrine. Allied to this change is another in the teaching about the end of the world. Here, though the idea of a personal judgment is preserved, the teaching lacks the picturesque extravagance characteristic of the Palestinian apocalypses. Punishment or reward follows immediately on death and judgment, and the lot then assigned is irremediable, eternal.
The greatest thinker among these Jews of the Dispersion was undoubtedly Philo (25 B.C.-A.D. 41) and it is in his writings that we can best see the aims and achievement of the movement and measure how far the one fell short of the other. Here, more fully than elsewhere, can we study the process by which, interpreting allegorically the sacred books of the Jews, these thinkers strove to find in the Law of Moses the principles and the completion of the philosophical and religious systems of Greece, much as Heraclitus, [1] strove to read Stoicism into Homer. It is an astonishing combination of Judaism with the leading ideas of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, learned but vague, lacking unity, and disconcertingly contradictory even in essentials. The body is essentially evil and by its contact with the soul inevitably soils the higher principle and leads it to sin. Man cannot therefore escape sin. To live well is the end of life and morality the most important part of philosophy. Of himself man cannot live a virtuous life. His goodness is the gift of God. Man knows God -- and ordinarily can only know Him -- by His works, and in His attributes; but by ascetic practices and assiduous study he can arrive at the direct knowledge of God which is ecstasy. In this, the momentarily intuitive vision of God upon earth, man, lifted above the good of merely intellectual knowledge, reaches to the very essence of God and comprehends in Him the unspeakable unity of all.
Of redemption from sin, of satisfaction for sin, there is not a word; and the ecstasy held out as the end of life, is, from the intellectual nature of the process which leads to it, a privilege which necessarily can only fall to scholars and thinkers. On the other hand, although the traditional monotheism remains intact, the use of the allegorical method of interpreting the sacred writings -- a practice borrowed from Stoicism -- was bound to weaken the value of the writings as records of historical fact; and in the very success of the effort to justify the Jewish faith by Greek philosophy there lay the danger of compromising the unique character of that faith as the revealed religion of Yahweh the one true God.
The new religion preached by Jesus Christ came then into a world where religious questions were already eagerly discussed. To satisfy the universal feeling of religious desire in its myriad aspirations and hopes, a host of rival cults and philosophies, preached by enthusiastic devotees, already competed. They did not die at the sudden coming of the new thing. Far from dying they survived; some of them to flourish even more than hitherto, some of them to vex, some to assist it: all of them in one way or another to condition its development. In the particularism of Palestinian Jewry it met its first great foe; and when, thanks to this struggle, its own separate character was established, the Pharisaic spirit survived in the first Christians themselves, to menace from within the free development of the new truth. Alexandrian Judaism was more friendly, but in its very friendliness was danger, for it did not always recognise the exclusiveness which was of the new faith's essence; and the spirit in which, sometimes unfortunately, it strove to reconcile the prophets and the philosophers, survived in the first great school of Christian teachers, to assist, and sometimes seriously to thwart, the philosophical exposition of that faith too. In Paganism the new religion was to find a frank and open enemy, violent and aggressive in its political aspects, inevitably so in the developing novelty of Emperor-worship, and the most slowly worsted enemy of all in the traditional rural cults -- cults to the lateness of whose overthrow there stands for witness the curious fact that one of our modern terms for heathen is the Roman word for rustic -- paganus.
1Not, of course, the Ionian philosopher of the sixth century B.C., but the writer who, six or seven hundred years later, wrote, under the name Heraclitus, the Homeric Allegories.
It remains, before we come to the story of the new religion, to note some of the tendencies at work, when it appeared, in the old religions whose leading features we have surveyed. The new religion came into existence on the morrow of a political revolution whose effect was world-wide, the transformation into a personal autocracy of the oligarchy which, through the power of Rome, controlled civilisation. That revolution was itself the last of a succession which, through nearly three centuries, had slowly changed the main conditions of social life, and in changing these had influenced the religious ideas and practices of a whole world. In those three hundred years there had been at work a continuous steady pressure working towards the political unity of civilisation, and destroying, as it progressed, the multitudinous barriers to freedom of thought and intercourse which the rivalry of a hundred states and cultures had thrown up in sheer self-defence. It had worked most powerfully for a more generous philosophical conception of man's relation to his fellows, and had even given the beginnings of a setting of fact to such philosophical theories as that of the universal brotherhood of men. This gentle and more generous spirit passed from the philosophers to the very citadel of particularism and privilege -- the law, and the revolution was reflected in the first western legislation that can truly be called social.
And, it needs no stating, this new force, bred of a new political and social unity, influenced no less strikingly the traditional notions of religion. For the intellectuals of Paganism there was that new thing the moral philosophy of the Stoics; and while some turned in desperation from the critic-riddled mythologies to the despair of scepticism, the neo-Pythagorean philosophies with their teaching of a divine providence and their liturgy of healing and purification attracted others. In this pagan elite we have the spectacle of a doctrinal enthusiasm reflected in, and influenced by, every form of intellectual activity, seeking restlessly but untiringly a system which will satisfy both intellect and heart. One of the most striking examples perhaps of this coincident doubt and desire, of the prevalent alternation of credulity and scepticism is Cicero. Cicero, conservative and respectful to tradition -- no embittered liberal in revolt like Lucretius -- who, in one mood, invoking his genius to move the people to gratitude for Jove's safeguarding of Rome can speak as a theologian, appears in quite another guise in his philosophical writings and his private correspondence. Do the gods exist? The question, self-found, he proceeds to discuss it. "No doubt it is hard to say 'no', if the matter is discussed in a public reunion. Amongst ourselves. . . nothing easier than to say 'no.' I am myself one of the pontiffs. I really believe we ought to preserve with jealous devotion all the ceremonial of the public cult. For all that, I should like to be able to prove to myself that the gods do exist, not the mere likelihood of their existence but to prove it as a certainty. I have so many difficulties troubling me in this matter that sometimes I come to think that really there are no gods." The like interest, the same anxious desire, finds an echo in all that was best in the literature of the time. Virgil, Plutarch, and Seneca most of all, reflect it in a kind of continuous ground rhythm that once in a while rising to the surface swells their genius to its full.
What of the crowd, the vast mass of Pagans? Here, too, the new spirit of brotherhood showed itself in the innumerable associations -- collegia -- for mutual assistance.
We note, too, the decline of certain cults. But the traditional paganism survives, still a force if only in the weight of its inertia. Especially does it survive in the local cults, the worship of the special protecting gods of the town, of the professions and trades and of the family, and in the cult of the dead. Local patriotism is here their inspiration, and their ritual observances become a matter of civic duty -- a reflection in religious matters of the rich and varied municipal life that was for so long the Empire's main strength; and the obligation of worship presses universally on every citizen. Even the elite who find their spiritual salvation in far different ways bow in practice to the prevailing spirit; and Seneca can end a devastating criticism of the cult of the gods of the Capitol with the practical recommendation that every wise man will worship them, not that this pleases the gods, but because it is commanded by the law.
And this traditional paganism remained for the mass of its clients substantially the same, anthropomorphic, a hero-worship, a magical cult, undoctrinal, unmoral, idolatrous. Philosophers might, by allegorising, seek to refine and purify it; they might give the myths a higher meaning through symbolic interpretations. But philosophers are rare. The average man has his bread to earn and lacking the time, if not the aptitude, for speculation, gives himself generally to the practice of life as he finds his fellows practising it. Hence polytheism survives the criticism of the thinkers, and the myths their ridicule; and idolatry remains so widespread, so universal a fact of life, that the pagan elite can mock at it as unsparingly as the later Christian Fathers. And with the universal idolatry there still flourished the old superstition and the old obscenity which the idolatry preached, only too often, from a hundred divine examples. "I am well aware," the words are those of a pagan, Denis of Halicarnassus, "that many philosophers explain allegorically the greater part of these filthy fables. But this philosophy is the possession of a very few only. The mass of mankind, the ordinary folk, accept the stories in their worst sense. Either they despise gods whose lives are so depraved, or, since the gods themselves are shown not to abstain from them, they come to the pitch that they do not recoil from the very vilest of vicious deeds." It is not unfair to say that the survival of this old classic paganism was due "in great part to the feebleness of its control over moral conduct, character and the passions, to the sanction it gave to every surrender to the beast that sleeps, alas, at the heart of each one of us."
Paganism's idea of God had in it no element of grandeur, of holiness, of sanctity; and in its practice, adoration and love could find no place. It was in fact little but a mentality, an attitude of mind which went with a certain routine of ritual. Though it accompanied every action of life, it did so only as an empty gesture, barren of influence, powerless to affect life itself or thought. Nevertheless the founder of the new political regime, Augustus, saw in it a means of control, a source of power, which, patronised, fostered, protected by the state, might become, because of its universal diffusion through the vast empire of so many races and tongues, a permanent reserve of support. Hence his vigorous and continued attempts to restore and reform it; his rich endowment of its temples; and his own public assiduity, and that of his successors, in the observance of its rites. There is attributed to one of his counsellors, Maecenas, a speech which sums up the new state policy in religious matters "Honour the gods according to the customs of your forefathers, see to it that others honour them too. As for those who would introduce among you any strange novelties of religion, hate them and let them feel your hatred. . . ." Such novelties there were indeed to be, for underneath the universal state-protected Hellenistic Paganism the old cults of Egypt and the East were once more slowly stirring. With their ideas of spiritual purification, of redemption from sin, and of personal immortality, expressed in a ritual incomparably seductive, these cults were later to do much to transform, yet once more, the religion of the populace; but for yet another century they were to-move only very slowly, their influence as yet hardly felt outside the underworld of the great cities of the East. Of greater immediate importance, in the first century A.D., was the new cult of the State itself, now in course of slow transformation to a worship of the reigning Emperor, and rapidly becoming the most popular cult of all.
Emperor worship was not a Roman invention. It appears, long before Rome was a power, in ancient Egypt, and it was sufficiently widespread throughout the East for Alexander to use it as a means of consolidating his conquests. The generals, who on his death divided up his Empire among themselves, took the practice as part of the legacy and it was already an established tradition when, in turn, these kingdoms fell before the Roman power. Roman philosophy, associating immortality with the great heroes of humanity -- an immortality they shared with the gods -- may have prepared the way in the west. For the hero lives for ever with the gods, soon he comes to be likened to them, to be considered after death as one of them. But once more it is in the east that the beginnings are to be found, in the cult there rendered to the different generals and proconsuls. Thus at the beginning of the second century Flaminius, the conqueror of the Macedonians, is associated in 196 at Chalcis with the cult of Herakles and Apollo. A century later the custom is general and Cicero can cite a cult of Verres as a count in his famous indictment, and make it a boast that he himself refused the proffered divine honours during his proconsulship of Cilicia. The Civil War helped greatly in the development of the practice, and the assassination of Julius Caesar was the occasion of the first official divinisation, the law of 44 B.C. which decreed to the dead hero the title of "Divine." In the Civil Wars which filled the next few years the rival leaders generously appropriated to themselves like honours -- all but Octavian. With characteristic caution he waited until with his final victory the honours came to him more surely than if they had been self-conferred. The title of Augustus conferred by the Senate in 27 B.C. had in it already something of the divine, and soon there began at Rome a private cult of the Genius of Augustus. In the provinces progress was more rapid, and altars were erected even during his lifetime to Augustus himself, though at Rome itself it was not customary, for yet another century or more, so to deify the reigning sovereign.
With the emperor there was associated in the ritual the goddess Rome; and presently the two became confounded and, worshipping the emperor, the citizen worshipped his country. It was not merely in a spirit of servility and flattery that this new imperial cult originated and developed. Round it there clustered from the beginning a host of nobler associations. There was thankfulness for the peace and prosperity that succeeded a century of bloody civil war, appreciation of Augustus as the deliverer from an age of anarchy; there was something of the sentiment of pride of race, almost of patriotism; and in this cult all the popular veneration for the majesty of the State's power found a natural and congenial expression, until in the end it became the very touchstone of loyalty and good citizenship. It was of all cults the most popular; and, excelling all others in the pomp that surrounded its celebrations and in the prestige of its priesthood, more than any other it came to stand as the established religion of the State.
It is not, however, in the development of any one particular religion that the most characteristic feature of the religious life of this age is to be sought. More significant, and of ultimately greater importance, is the tendency of all these cults to amalgamate. The new political unity; Rome's new role as the capital of that new unity, the city where the vast Empire's innumerable religions were to meet and to live together, and through which as through a great clearing house of culture the hundred fashions of thought and life were to pass, and to return, refashioned, to the distant provinces; the quasi-official propaganda of the Roman religions; all fostered this new levelling tendency. Rome had conquered Carthage and Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and in turn those ancient civilisations, like some captive mistress, were to enslave their conqueror. The subject peoples brought with them into the Empire their gods as they brought their other cultural habits, and the strangers soon appeared in every city side by side with the native deities, sometimes in rivalry, sometimes roughly identified by a similarity of myth or an identity of divine function. Sometimes the different religions co-existed in a strange companionship that was unconscious of basic incompatibility, or again, combining, they gave rise to newer cults.
This tendency to assimilate and level the cults of the world, which was at work throughout the countries ringed around the Mediterranean Sea, began unmistakably to show itself after the conquests of Alexander. It developed with ever increasing vigour for the next four or five centuries. The nature of the pagan cults assisted the development. They lacked organisation, lacked a body of religious doctrine and consequently there was in them no place for anything corresponding to an Act of Faith. The clients of the different gods were not therefore "members" of the cults as a Christian is a "member" of his Church. Remembering also that Paganism's one obligation was observance of ritual, it is easy to understand the speedy development of this syncretist tendency. Nothing could have been more congenial to the nature of Paganism. But it would be erroneous to suppose that Syncretism made for greater simplicity, for a real unity that would take the place of the old confusing multiplicity of gods and cults. The final result of the movement was confusion greater than ever. It introduced new complexities, and, by its juxtaposition of gods, multiplying ever more and more the number of dwellers on Olympus, it made rather for polytheism more and more hopelessly. For the one Jupiter whom the ancient Roman knew, there were now, to the delight of the sceptic, half a dozen -- as often as not rivals -- to conciliate whom simultaneously called for considerable tact on the part of the pious. So for example Xenophon records how, on his return from Asia, he sacrificed in turn to Zeus Eleutherios and to Zeus Basileus. All in vain. Matters were rather worse than before. He learnt from one learned in such affairs that the jealousy of Zeus Meilichios was the obstacle, and hastening to propitiate the last, he finally received an answer to his prayers. Thanks to the syncretist development "Ideas become more indistinct; but no single idea of divinity clearly emerges. This theocrasia. . . did nothing for monotheism but a great deal for scepticism and the darkest superstitions."
In the six hundred years that lay between Nabuchodonosor's final destruction of their ancient kingdom and the coming of Christianity, the Jews had suffered under a series of political revolutions. Their Babylonian conquerors had fallen to the Persians, and the Persians to Alexander. Alexander's Greek successors had, by their attempted suppression of Judaism, roused a revolt that resulted in an independent Jewish state and finally this had fallen to the Romans. Each of the political systems under which the Jews had lived had left its mark on national characteristics, but none had effected a change equal to that which resulted from the years of exile that followed the conquest of Nabuchodonosor. The exiles were indeed allowed to return by the Persian who conquered Nabuchodonosor's hapless descendant, but the Jewry of post-exilic times was a new thing, and the restored national life was no mere resumption of the old.
Henceforth there were indeed to be two Jewries, for not all the exiles returned, and from the Babylonian captivity the historian has ever before him this dual development of the race and its religion. The colonies of those who chose permanently to exile themselves from Palestine were for the most part, originally, in the valley of the Euphrates the land of the captivity; but later, and especially in the years that followed the conquests and death of Alexander, it was the countries of the hellenic culture, more particularly Egypt, that attracted them and Alexandria itself became a second Jerusalem. With the Roman conquest of the East, and the consequent political unity of the whole Mediterranean world, the Jews spread into the Latin West. All the Mediterranean countries now knew them, as they themselves could boast. There was a colony of 10,000 (men alone) at Rome in the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37) and about the same time they are reckoned at one in seven of the population of Egypt. Harnack estimates that they formed 7 per cent. of the total population of the Empire in the reign of Augustus.
The Jewry of Palestine and that of the Dispersion are equally important in a study of Christian origins, for the Palestinian Jewry was the birthplace and cradle of the new religion, and the Jewry of the Dispersion was its first means of propaganda, the bridge by which it entered the world of Paganism outside Palestine. The two Jewries were greatly affected by every phase of contemporary religious development; they were affected in widely different ways. For the exiles who returned to Palestine, there had followed a full restoration of the forms of the pre-exilic religious life. Jerusalem was once again the Holy City, the Temple was rebuilt, and the prescribed routine of daily sacrifice and ritual prayers was resumed as though no calamity of war had ever interrupted it. The main effect upon this Jewry of the contact with the religions of their conquerors, had been to strengthen and confirm its own traditional faith. Especially were these Jews strengthened in their hold on the doctrine that Yahweh is God and is alone God. The old fight of the Prophets against idolatry is never again to need renewing. In none of the Prophets who follow the captivity is there any reference to it as a national sin. Yahweh is more clearly seen as the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, and if known in an especial manner to the Jews, knowable to the rest by His work of creation and His providence. More than ever is emphasis laid on the fact that He is the God of Holiness, of Justice in the moral sense, requiring in this an imitation of Himself in those He has created. The political catastrophe has served to emphasize that something more is required for future salvation than the mere fact of birth into the race of His choice.
Man is body and soul, is immortal, and around his relations with Yahweh his Creator, through the Law set for his observance, there now begins a whole world of new speculation and thought. Man's universal inclination to evil, his weakness in the presence of temptation to wrong-doing, are a legacy from the failure of the first of mankind, Adam. But the weakness is not fatal. An observance of the Law is possible and will ensure salvation. Observance of the Law is possible, but it is increasingly difficult; for one of the chief results of the exile has been a cult of the Law for its own sake, a cult that has gradually overlaid its first simple austerity with a mass of deduced precepts such that only the scholar trained in the Law can safely find his way through the mazes, and the Law begins to cover the minutest detail of all the myriad acts of life. To teach the law, to interpret it, there has gradually grown up the "corps" of the Scribes. They are an extra-levitical religious force, standing to the priesthood much as the new law cult stands to the Temple liturgy of sacrifice; and the foundation of their prestige is their service in the dark days of the captivity, when, deprived of that liturgy, Jewish piety was saved by study and meditation on the Divine Law.
This cult of the Law was now perhaps the chief force in the religious life of the Palestine Jewry, and in its most enthusiastic devotees developing ever more surely into a barren and exaggerated formalism. It was not, however, the only force in that life; and the Jew, torn between the consciousness of his own weakness and the austere fact of the well-nigh unobservable Law, about which the Scribes in their many schools disputed, turned for consolation and encouragement to the mercy of the Law's author. Since the captivity there had gradually developed the notion of an individual responsibility in spiritual matters, and along with this a sense of Yahweh’s providence as a quality by reason of which men, not merely in the mass, as a chosen nation, but even as individuals, were important and matter for the Divine Concern. Side by side with the cult of the Law there was a cult of the Psalms; and in the interior life thus fed and stimulated, the pious Jew escaped at once the deadening formalism of a merely external law observance, and the consequences of a fatal identification of the Divine Lawgiver with His unauthorised human commentators.
The role of the prophet diminished; and with the death of Malachi there began a long period of four centuries in which the Jew, while the different pagan empires disputed his kingdom among themselves, lived spiritually on the riches of his past, giving himself to the twin cults of the Law and the life of interior holiness and to meditation on the manner and the time of the next showing forth of Yahweh’s mercy -- the looked for coming of the Messias. Here speculation was rich and varied indeed, much of it stimulated and coloured by pagan motives of eschatology, and related almost always to the anticipated end of Yahweh’s earthly creation. Sometimes the coming of the promised Saviour is expected as coincident with the end of the world, as the judgment of Yahweh through him on His defeated enemies. Another school looked for the Saviour's reign as an earthly preliminary to the promised eternity of bliss. After his victory over Yahweh’s enemies, he will, as ruler of the world, transform it through justice and peace, judging mankind and allotting to each his punishment or reward. The wicked shall be punished for ever in flames, the good be received into paradise, a high place where they shall see Yahweh and rejoice with Him for ever. The Messias himself was conceived as a great prince to be sent by God to establish His kingdom on earth, as a warrior and judge, as the king who will reign eternally. Generally, too, he is conceived as already existing, awaiting the day of his coming; but he is never conceived as himself divine, nor did the general conception ever associate with his coming and the execution of his mission the idea of vicarious suffering and expiation.
For this Palestinian Judaism the conquests of Alexander were the beginning of much new development. The hellenistic culture which thereafter spread over all the semitic East could not leave it untouched. From Alexander himself, and from the Ptolemies to whom Palestine fell as a province on Alexander's death, their religious institutions had nothing but protection. But the victory of the dynasty of the Seleucid rulers of Antioch (198) brought about, with the change of ruler, the novelty of an aggressive movement on the part of the state to hellenise not merely the secular culture of the Jews but their religion also. The Jews were to syncretise Judaism at the order of the hellenic Paganism that was now their master. A national insurrection was the consequence; and after a series of bloody wars the Jews, under the heroic Judas Maccabeus, not only secured their threatened religious independence, but shook themselves free of the rule of the foreigner. The new political independence lasted for a century until, in 63 B.C., Jerusalem fell to Pompey's armies and Rome. It was a century of religious revival. The hellenistic influences of the pre-Maccabean generations did indeed survive, especially among the families of what may be called the ecclesiastical nobility, and those from whose ranks the leaders in public life were recruited. This was the party of the Sadducees, who reduced observance of the Law to the minimum of what was actually written, and rationalised, as far as they could, the ancient beliefs. Sadducees formed a tiny colony of Hellenism in the very heart of Jewry, controlling political life through their wealth and through their command of the high priesthood which money had brought them.
This attitude of compromise with the foreign culture was, however, the attitude of the few; and the mass of the nation followed rather the influence of those jealous doctors of the Law, the Scribes. Striving to keep themselves clear of the pagan culture's corrupting influence, they "separated" themselves from its every manifestation -- whence the later name by which they were called, and called themselves, Pharisees, the Separated. Their spiritual lineage was from the heroes who had formed the armies of Maccabeus, and the traditional religious patriotism of the sect won it a deep and constant influence with the mass of the Jews.
The Judaism of the Dispersion is best studied as it appeared in Alexandria its most influential centre, the second city of the Empire, the Metropolis of the East, the capital of the Dispersion, and for the Jew the second Jerusalem. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the fact of the Dispersion in the early history of the Catholic Church. From Antioch to Italy and through Gaul to Spain the chain of Jewish colonies spread, and it was around these islands of belief in the pagan sea that the first Christian groups were formed. Through the loosely federated colonies of the Dispersion the new religion was to find a material facility of propaganda such as no other religion could hope to possess. In the colonies of the Dispersion the Jews lived their own life. They did not intermarry with the surrounding Gentiles, and, careful of their traditional cult of morality, they habitually avoided the amusements that were the core of the pagan social life -- the theatres, the circus, the baths. They were exempt from the charge of public office as they were debarred from military service; and as members of a privileged religion their synagogues received protection and they themselves were judged according to their own law.
It was nevertheless, impossible for them to live entirely uninfluenced by their surroundings. They became Greek speaking, for example, and forgot their Hebrew to such an extent that it was necessary for their own use to have their sacred writings translated into Greek -- whence the Septuagint. With the new language they entered into contact with all the rich variety of the world's most gifted civilisation. Greece, its literature, its philosophy, its spirit of speculation on fundamental things, now lay open to the scholars and thinkers of the Dispersion. Were they to close their minds to the new influence, to shut it out as a thing necessarily accursed, in the fashion of many of their compatriots in Palestine? -- or was there not a means of conciliating what was good in it with their own traditions, and so of enlarging the sphere of their influence without surrendering what was vital to their faith? The thinkers of Alexandrian Judaism chose the latter alternative, and using Greek Philosophy to universalise the Law, strove to create an entente where the corrected philosophy and the Law, philosophically explained, should be seen as two aspects of the same unity. The Jewish faith remained the same thing, with its eternal foundations of monotheism and the personal immortality of the individual soul. The best of Greek philosophy accorded here with Jewish belief; and while the Jew accepted the philosophical allegorising of the Greek myths and fables that made of them merely a vehicle for the teaching of abstract truths, he was prepared, in the same accommodating spirit, to explain allegorically, the contents of his own sacred books. It is the idea hidden behind the fact that is the all-important thing; the fact related is secondary. Greek Philosophy thus becomes a religion, accepting the principle of the supernatural; Judaism, without ceasing to be a religion, will be a philosophy, "searching beneath the word revealed, the reasonable teaching it covers."
Religious ceremonial and liturgy lost much of their importance in this presentation of Judaism, except in so far as they were symbols of truth; the old notion of the true religion as meant exclusively for the chosen race disappears, and most important of all, the concept of the promised Saviour changes fundamentally. For these philosophically minded Jews it is no longer a warrior, judge or king, who is to restore the kingdom and wreak vengeance on the enemies of Yahweh, but a triumphant, all-conquering true doctrine. Allied to this change is another in the teaching about the end of the world. Here, though the idea of a personal judgment is preserved, the teaching lacks the picturesque extravagance characteristic of the Palestinian apocalypses. Punishment or reward follows immediately on death and judgment, and the lot then assigned is irremediable, eternal.
The greatest thinker among these Jews of the Dispersion was undoubtedly Philo (25 B.C.-A.D. 41) and it is in his writings that we can best see the aims and achievement of the movement and measure how far the one fell short of the other. Here, more fully than elsewhere, can we study the process by which, interpreting allegorically the sacred books of the Jews, these thinkers strove to find in the Law of Moses the principles and the completion of the philosophical and religious systems of Greece, much as Heraclitus, [1] strove to read Stoicism into Homer. It is an astonishing combination of Judaism with the leading ideas of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, learned but vague, lacking unity, and disconcertingly contradictory even in essentials. The body is essentially evil and by its contact with the soul inevitably soils the higher principle and leads it to sin. Man cannot therefore escape sin. To live well is the end of life and morality the most important part of philosophy. Of himself man cannot live a virtuous life. His goodness is the gift of God. Man knows God -- and ordinarily can only know Him -- by His works, and in His attributes; but by ascetic practices and assiduous study he can arrive at the direct knowledge of God which is ecstasy. In this, the momentarily intuitive vision of God upon earth, man, lifted above the good of merely intellectual knowledge, reaches to the very essence of God and comprehends in Him the unspeakable unity of all.
Of redemption from sin, of satisfaction for sin, there is not a word; and the ecstasy held out as the end of life, is, from the intellectual nature of the process which leads to it, a privilege which necessarily can only fall to scholars and thinkers. On the other hand, although the traditional monotheism remains intact, the use of the allegorical method of interpreting the sacred writings -- a practice borrowed from Stoicism -- was bound to weaken the value of the writings as records of historical fact; and in the very success of the effort to justify the Jewish faith by Greek philosophy there lay the danger of compromising the unique character of that faith as the revealed religion of Yahweh the one true God.
The new religion preached by Jesus Christ came then into a world where religious questions were already eagerly discussed. To satisfy the universal feeling of religious desire in its myriad aspirations and hopes, a host of rival cults and philosophies, preached by enthusiastic devotees, already competed. They did not die at the sudden coming of the new thing. Far from dying they survived; some of them to flourish even more than hitherto, some of them to vex, some to assist it: all of them in one way or another to condition its development. In the particularism of Palestinian Jewry it met its first great foe; and when, thanks to this struggle, its own separate character was established, the Pharisaic spirit survived in the first Christians themselves, to menace from within the free development of the new truth. Alexandrian Judaism was more friendly, but in its very friendliness was danger, for it did not always recognise the exclusiveness which was of the new faith's essence; and the spirit in which, sometimes unfortunately, it strove to reconcile the prophets and the philosophers, survived in the first great school of Christian teachers, to assist, and sometimes seriously to thwart, the philosophical exposition of that faith too. In Paganism the new religion was to find a frank and open enemy, violent and aggressive in its political aspects, inevitably so in the developing novelty of Emperor-worship, and the most slowly worsted enemy of all in the traditional rural cults -- cults to the lateness of whose overthrow there stands for witness the curious fact that one of our modern terms for heathen is the Roman word for rustic -- paganus.
1Not, of course, the Ionian philosopher of the sixth century B.C., but the writer who, six or seven hundred years later, wrote, under the name Heraclitus, the Homeric Allegories.
