|Christianity {362}grew. It was a natural product. It did not spring,
full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang from the head
of Zeus. It was not even invented by any little group or school of men,
Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church
of Jerusalem, Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew--slowly. It
developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual
stages in all the teeming centres of the Roman world; and even after it
had assumed a consistent form as the Holy Catholic Church, it still
went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends,
but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican
Council to the last new departure of the last new group of American
sectaries.
Christianity grew--in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities
of the Roman empire--in Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Cyrene,
Byzantium, Rome. Its highway was the sea. Though partly Jewish in
origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal
and international religion. Therefore we may gain some approximate
knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious
condition of these various great towns at the time when Christianity
began to spring spontaneous in their midst. We can arrive at some idea
of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was
evolved.
Once more, Christianity grew--for the most part among {363}the lower
orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself among the
slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish, Syrian, and African immigrants,
the Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the petty shopkeepers, the
pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres.
Hence, while based upon Judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all
those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were
common to the whole world, and especially to the Eastern Mediterranean
basin. Furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular
those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the
popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised,
Hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. It
was a democratic rather than an official product. We have to look,
therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious
thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould
Christianity. I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched
and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from
Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic
systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the
root-stratum of religious practice and belief in Antioch and Alexandria,
in Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and Rome. _It based itself above
all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection_. Yet again,
Christianity originated first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or
Semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very
moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no
doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors,
slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest
adherents. Hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of Judaism
with the central ideas of the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of
the Mediterranean basin. We must expect in it much that was common
in Syria, Asia Minor, Hellas, and Egypt,--something even from Gaul,
Hispania, Carthage. Its first o w great {364}apostle, if we may believe
our authorities, was one Saul or Paul, a half-Hellenised Jew of Semitic
and commercial Tarsus in Cilicia, and a Roman citizen. Its first great
churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the Levant. _Its very
name of Christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan
city of Antioch_.
It is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of Hellenised
and Romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of
Christianity.
Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle
of the new religion. _I do not mean that Jerusalem was not very probably
the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric
Christ-worshippers, or that Galilee was not the region where the Christ
himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever
really existed_. In those matters the traditions handed down to us in
the relatively late Gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they
may not. But Christianity as we know it, the Christianity of the Pauline
epistles and the later writings, such as the Gospels and the works
of the Fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider Syrian and
Gentile growth. It embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered
on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in
Judæa itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly
and official Jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the
popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of
northern Syria.
Antioch, where Christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a
handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the Greek Seleucid
kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the Syrian area. _At the time
of Paul (if there was a Paul)_, it probably contained half a million
people; it was certainly the largest town in Asia, and worthy to be
compared with Rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. Many things
about its position are deserving of notice. It stood upon the banks
of the Orontes, a {365}sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural
plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at
Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of Syria and
the east towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterranean in front connected
it with Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the caravan routes across
the Syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of
Mesopotamia and the remoter east. It was thus the main entrepôt of the
through trade between two important worlds. The Venice of its time,
it lay at the focal point where the highroads of Europe and of Asia
converged.
Scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the
days of Paul, Buddhist ideas from India seem to have dribbled through
and affected the Syrian world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later
dribbled through and affected the thought of Alexandria: and some
importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the
mystical east. Now, I do not care to deny that budding Christianity may
have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical
side by floating elements of Buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the
Christ may have been nursed by the Magi. But on the whole I think the
facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial
human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will
suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth.
The native soil contained already every essential element that was
needed to feed it--the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the
Man-God, the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension.
So that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international
position of Antioch, as the double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and Asia,
I am not inclined to think that points peculiar to Buddhism need
have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new
religion. For we must remember that Buddhism itself did but subsume
into its own fabric ideas {366}which were common to Peru and Mexico, to
Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt, and which came out in fresh forms,
surging up from below, in the creed of Christendom. _If anything is
clear from our previous researches it is this--that the world has never
really had more than one religion--“of many names, a single central
shape,”_ as the poet phrases it.
The Syrian people, Semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the
rest of the eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion of the successors
of Alexander. A quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they
underwent rapid and facile Hellenisation. It was an easy task for them
to accept Greek culture and Greek religion. The worshipper of Adonis had
little difficulty in renaming his chief god as Dionysus and continuing
to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after
the ancestral pattern. The Astarte whom the east had given to
Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite, came back again as Aphrodite to
Astarte’s old sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and cults were but
simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in
origin and function. Thus the easy-going Syrian had few scruples about
practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting
to the hospitality of his Semitic temples the Hellenic deities of the
reigning Antiochi.
The Seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to
impose the alien gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the southern
mountains. Antiochus IV. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of
intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom of Palestine. He reckoned
without his hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would not away with his
“idolatrous” rites--would not permit the worship of Zeus and Pallas,
of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of
Jahweh. The rebellion of the Maccabees secured at least the religious
independence of Judæa from the early Seleucid period down to the days
of Vespasian and Titus. Lower Syria remained true in her arid hills
{367}to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the God of Israel. And at
the same time the Jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries,
carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his
ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.
In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorption of Syria, a most
cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled
Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a
way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. And among the
popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of
Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte, and of the local gods or
goddesses, the Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we
learnt from Malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the
city, and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or Fortune. _In other
words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the
death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all
been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of Antioch and of Syria in
general_.
Let us note here, too, that the particular group of Jah-weh-worshippers
among whom the Christ is said to have found his personal followers, were
not people of the priestly type of Jerusalem, but Galilæan peasants of
the northern mountains, separated from the most orthodox set of Jews by
the intrusive wedge of heretical Samaritans, and closely bordering on
the heathen Phoenician seaboard--“the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.”
Here Judaism and heathenism marched together; here Jahweh had his
worshippers among the fishers of the lake, while Hellenism had fixed
itself in the statelier villas of Tiberias and Ptole-mais.
Alexandria was another of the great cosmopolitan seaport towns where
Christianity made its earliest converts, and assumed not a few of its
distinctive tenets. Now, in Alexandria, Hellenism and the immemorially
ancient Egyptian religion found themselves face to face at very close
{368}quarters. It is true, the town in its historical aspect was mainly
Greek, founded by the great Macedonian himself, and priding itself on
its pure Hellenic culture. But the mass of the lower orders who thronged
its alleys must surely have consisted of more or less mongrel Egyptians,
still clinging with all the old Egyptian conservatism to the ideas and
practices and rites of their fathers. Besides these, we get hints of a
large cosmopolitan seafaring population, among whom strange faiths and
exotic gods found ready acceptance. Beside the stately forms of the
Greek pantheon, and the mummified or animal-headed Egyptian deities,
the imported Syrian worship of Adonis had acquired a firm footing;
_the annual festival of the slaughtered god was one of the principal
holidays_; and other Syrian or remoter faiths had managed to secure
their special following. The hybrid Serapis occupied the stateliest fane
of the hybrid city. In that huge and busy hive, indeed, every form of
cult found a recognised place, and every creed was tolerated which did
not inculcate interference with the equal religious freedom of others.
The Ptolemaic family represents in itself this curious adaptability of
the Græco-Egyptian Alexandrian mind. At Alexandria and in the Delta,
the kings appear before us as good Hellenes, worshipping their ancestral
deities in splendid temples; but in the Thebaid, the god Ptolemy or
the goddess Cleopatra erected buildings in honor of Ptah or Khem in
precisely the old Egyptian style, and appeared on their propyla in the
guise of Pharaohs engaged in worshipping Amen-Ra or Osiris. The great
Alexander himself had inaugurated this system when he gave himself out
as the son of “Zeus Ammon”; and his indirect representatives carried
it on throughout with a curious dualism which excused itself under the
veil of arbitrary identifications. Thus Serapis himself was the dead
Apis bull, invested with the attributes of an Osiris and of the Hellenic
Hades; while Amen-Ra was Zeus in an Egyptian avatar.
The large Jewish colony at Alexandria also prepared the way {369}for the
ultimate admixture of Neo-Platonism in the Christian faith; while _the
Egyptian belief in Triads of gods formed the groundwork for the future
doctrine of the Trinity_, so doggedly battled for by the Alexandrian
Athanasius. It is true that Ampère and Preller have strenuously denied
any Egyptian admixture in the philosophy of Alexandria; and their
reasoning may be conclusive enough as to the upper stratum of thought:
but it must at least be admitted that popular belief in the city of the
Ptolemies must have been deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of
its Egyptian substratum. Now, in the growth of Christianity, it was
the people who counted, not the official classes, the learned, or the
philosophic. We must not attribute to the population of the East End of
London the theology of Pusey or the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Christianity would seem also to have taken part at least of its form in
Rome. And as Roman influence extended likewise over every portion of
the vast empire, I must say a very few words here about the origin and
growth of the Roman religion.
That religion, as it comes upon us in the few glimpses we get of its
early Italic and pre-Hellenised form, was one of the rudest and most
primitive type, almost savage in its extreme simplicity. It knew hardly
any great gods by name: the few deities it possessed, it expressed only
for the most part by adjectival names. Few, I say, as to type, for as to
number of individuals, their name indeed was legion; they pervaded
the whole, world in that reckless multiplicity which distinguishes the
simple ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral peoples. With
the Romans, this multiplicity, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into a
relatively settled and civilised agricultural condition. A vast number
of small departmental gods, with few or no great ones--that is the first
state of the Roman pantheon.
The central point of old Roman religion was clearly the household;
the family ghosts or _lares_ were the most honoured {370}gods. We may
instructively compare Mr. Chalmers’s account of the theology of New
Guinea. Beside these ancestral shades, or almost identical with them,
came the _pénates_ or practical deities of the store-room, perhaps the
representatives of the victims slain as foundation-ghosts at the first
erection of the building. Of these two, the Lares were undoubtedly the
departed ancestors of the family; they lived near the spot where they
were first buried (for the old Romans were buriers), and they still
presided over the household as in life, like its fathers and senators.
They were worshipped daily with prayers and simple offerings of food
and drink; their masks or busts which hung on the wall were perhaps the
representatives, or in ancient days the coverings, of the old oracular
heads or skulls; for the skulls themselves may have been preserved in
wax, as so often elsewhere at an earlier period. * The Penates, which
were worshipped with the Lares, seem to have stood for the family spirit
in a more generalised way; they represent the continuity and persistence
of its Fortune; and therefore, if we may trust the analogy of the
Fortune of a town, they are probably the ghosts of the foundation or
renewal victims. In judging of all this, we cannot attach too great
importance to the analogy of Negritto and Polynesian customs.
* To this use of the oracular head I would venture also to
refer the common employment of small masks as amulets: an
employment which, as Bottiger rightly remarks, explains “the
vast number of such subjects met with in antique gems.”
Other deities are more public. But most of them seem to belong to the
simplest and most immediately ghost-like stratum. They had to do with
sowing, reaping, and vintage--in other words, were corn or wine gods. Or
else they had to do with the navigable river, the Tiber, and the port
of Ostia, which lay at its mouth--in other words, were spring and river
gods. Or else they had to do with war and expeditions--in other words
were slaughtered campaign gods of the Iphigenia pattern, Bellonas and
battle-victims.
Among {371}this dim crowd of elder manufactured deities, Saturnus, the
sowing god, was most likely an annual corn-victim; his adjectival name
by itself suggests that conclusion. Terminus, the boundary god, is
already familiar to us. About these two at least we can hardly be
mistaken. A red-haired man (as in Egypt) no doubt preceded as yearly
corn-victim the red-haired puppies still slaughtered for the crops
within the ken of Festus. Seia, Segetia, Tutilina, the successive
corn-deities, we have already considered. They seem to equate with the
successive maidens slain for the corn in other communities, and still
commemorated in our midst by the corn-baby and the corn-wife. At each
stage of age in the corn, a corresponding stage in the age of the human
victim was considered desirable. But how reconcile this idea with the
existence of numerous petty functional deities--gods of the door and
the hinge?--with the Cunina who guards the child in the cradle, and the
Statina who takes care of him when he begins to stand? I answer, all
these are but adjectival gods, mere ghosts or spirits, unknown in
themselves, but conceived as exercising this particular function. “The
god that does so-and-so” is just a convenient expression, no more;
it serves its purpose, and that was enough for the practical Roman. How
readily they could put up with these rough-and-ready identifications we
know in the case of Aius Locutius and of the Deus Rediculus.
Each Terminus and each Silvanus is thus the god or protecting ghost
of each boundary stone or each sacred grove--not a proper name, but a
class--not a particular god, but a _kind_ of spirit. The generalised and
abstract gods are later unifications of all the individuals included
in each genus. The Janus, I take it, was at first the victim once
sacrificed annually before each gate of the city, as he is sacrificed
still on the west coast of Africa: as the god of opening, he was
slaughtered at the opening of every new year; and the year conversely
opened its course with the month sacred to the god of opening. Perhaps
he was also slain {372}as fortune at the beginning of each war. The
Vesta is the hearth-goddess; and every house had its Vesta; perhaps
originally a slaughtered hearth-victim. Every man had in like manner his
Genius, an ancestral protecting spirit; the corresponding guardian of
the woman was her Juno; they descend to Christianity, especially in
its most distinctive Roman form, as the guardian angels. Mars was a
corn-spirit; only later was he identified with the expeditionary god.
His annual expulsion as the human scapegoat has already been considered.
The Jupiter or Jovis was a multiple wine-god, doubtless in every case
the annual victim slain, Dionysus-wise, for the benefit of the vineyard.
Each village and each farm had once its Jovis, specially worshipped,
and, I doubt not, originally slaughtered, at the broaching of the
year’s first wine-cask in April. But his name shows that, as usual, he
was also identified with that very ancient Sky-god who is common to all
the Aryan race; the particular Jovis being probably sacrificed,
himself to himself, before the old Sky-god’s altar, as elsewhere the
Dionysus-victim at the shrine of Dionysus.
These identifications, I know, may sound fanciful to mere classical
scholars, unacquainted with the recent advances in anthropology, and
I would not have ventured to propound them at an earlier stage of our
involved argument; but now that we have seen and learned to recognise
the extraordinary similarity of all pantheons the whole world over, I
think the exact way these deities fall into line with the wall-gods,
gate-gods, corn-gods, wine-gods, boundary-gods, forest-gods,
fountain-gods, and river-gods everywhere else must surely be allowed
some little weight in analogically placing them.
The later Roman religion only widens, if at all, from within its own
range, by the inclusion of larger and larger tribal elements. Thus the
Deus Fidius, who presided over each separate alliance, I take to be the
ghost of the victim slain to form a covenant; just as in Africa to
this day, _when {373}two tribes have concluded a treaty of peace,
they crucify a slave “to ratify the bargain.”_ The nature of such
covenant victims has been well illustrated by Professor Robertson Smith,
but the growth of the covenant-gods, who finally assumed very wide
importance, is a subject which considerations of space prevent me from
including in our present purview. The victim, at first no doubt human,
became later a theanthropic animal; as did also the Jo vis-victim and
the representatives of the other adjectival or departmental deities.
The Roman Mars and the Sabine Ouirinus may readily have been amalgamated
into a Mars Ouirinus, if we remember that Mars is probably a general
name, and that any number of Martes may at any time have been
sacrificed. The Jovis of the city of Rome thus comes at last to be the
greatest and most powerful Jupiter of them all, and the representative
of the Roman union. Under Hellenising influences, however, all these
minor gods get elevated at last into generalised deities; and the animal
victims offered to them become mere honorific or piacular sacrifices,
hardly identified at all with the great images who receive them.
The Hellenising process went so far, indeed, at Rome that the old Roman
religion grew completely obscured, and almost disappeared, save in its
domestic character. In the home, the Lares still held the first rank.
Elsewhere, Bacchus took the place of Liber, while the traits of Hermes
were fastened on the adjectival Roman bargain-spirit Mercurius. Yet even
so, the Roman retained his primitive belief in corn and wine gods, under
the newer guises; his Ceres he saw as one with the Attic Demeter; his
rural ceremonies still continued unchanged by the change of attributes
that infected and transfigured the city temples. Moreover, the Romans,
and later the cosmopolitan population of Rome, borrowed gods and
goddesses freely from without in ever increasing numbers. In very early
days, they borrowed from Etruria; later, they borrowed Apollo from
Greece, and (by an etymological blunder) {374}fixed upon their own
Hercules the traits of Heracles. On the occasion of a plague, they
publicly summoned Asclepios, the Greek leech-god, from Epidaurus; and
at the very crisis of the life-and-death conflict with Hannibal, they
fetched the sacred field-stone known as Cybele, the Mother of the Gods,
from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of Pessinus with strange compliance
let their goddess go; and the whole orgiastic cult of Attis was thus
transported entire to Italian soil. The rites of the great festival were
carried on at Rome almost as they had been carried on before in Phrygia;
so that an Asiatic worship of the most riotous type found a firm
official footing in the centre of the empire. The priest, indeed, was
still an Asiatic, or at least not a Roman; but the expulsion of Hannibal
from Italy which followed on this adoption of a foreign god, must have
greatly increased the prestige and reputation of the alien and orgiastic
deity.
The luxurious Aphrodite of Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the
same time with Cybele. Originally a Semitic goddess, she combined the
Hellenic and oriental ideas, and was identified in Italy with the old
Latin Venus.
Later still, yet other gods were imported from without. New deities
flowed in from Asia and Africa. The population of the city under the
early empire had almost ceased to be Roman, save in the upper strata;
a vast number of slaves from all parts of the world formed the lowest
layer in the crowded vaults: the middle rank was filled by Syrians,
Africans, Greeks, Sicilians, Moors, and freedmen--men of all places and
races from Spain or Britain to the Euphrates and the Nile, the steppes
and the desert. The Orontes, said Juvenal, had flooded the Tiber. Among
this mixed mass of all creeds and colours, subfusk or golden-haired, a
curious mixture of religions grew up. Some of these were mere ready-made
foreign importations--Isis-worship from Egypt; Jahweh-worship from
Judæa; strange eastern or northern or African cults from the remotest
parts of Pontus or Mauritania. Others were intermixtures {375}or
rationalisations of older religions, such as Christianity, which mingled
together Judaism and Adonis or Osiris elements; such as Gnosticism,
which, starting from Zoroastrian infiltrations, kneaded all the gods of
the world at last into its own supreme mystic and magic-god Abraxas.
Looking a little deeper through the empire in general, we see that from
the time of Augustus onward, the need for a new cosmopolitan religion,
to fit the new cosmopolitan state, was beginning to be dimly felt and
acknowledged. Soldiers, enlisted in one country, took the cult and
images of their gods to another. The bull-slaying Mithra (in whom we can
hardly fail to see a solar form of the bull-god, who sacrifices a bull,
himself to himself, before his own altar) was worshipped here and
there, as numerous bas-reliefs show, from Persia to Britain. The Gaul
endeavoured to identify his own local war-gods with the Roman Mars, who
had been Hellenised in turn into the duplicate presentment of the Greek
Ares. The Briton saw his river-gods remodelled in mosaic into images
like those of Roman Tiber, or provided with the four horses who drag the
Roman Neptune, as Neptune had borrowed the representation at least from
the Greek Poseidon. And this was all the easier because everywhere alike
horses were sacrificed to sea or river, in lieu of human victims; just
as everywhere corn-gods were dressed in green, and everywhere wine-gods
wore coronals of vine-leaves on their holy foreheads. Men felt the truth
I have tried to impress, that _everywhere and always there is but one
religion_. Attributes and origin were so much alike that worship
was rapidly undergoing a cosmopolitanisation of name, as it already
possessed a similarity of rites and underlying features. Language itself
assisted this unifying process. In the west, as Latin spread, Latin
names of gods superseded local ones; in the east, as Greek spread,
Hellenic deities gave their titles and their beautiful forms to
native images. An artificial unity was introduced {376}and fixed by a
conventional list of Greek and Roman equivalents; and in the west, as
Greek art gained ground and spread, noble Greek representations of the
higher gods in ideal human form became everywhere common.
But that was not enough. As the government was one, under a strong
centralised despotism, it was but natural that the religion should be
one also, under the rule of a. similar omnipotent deity. _Man makes his
heaven in the image of earth_; his pantheon answers to his political
constitution. The mediaeval hall of heaven had an imperial God, like the
Othos or the Fredericks, on his regal throne, surrounded by a court of
great barons and abbots in the angels and archangels, the saints and
martyrs: the new religions, like spiritualism and Theosophy, which
spring up in the modern democratic world, are religions of free and
independent spirits, hardly even theistic. The Roman empire thus
demanded a single religion under a single strong god. It tended to
find it, if not in the Genius of Trajan or Antonine, then in some
bull-slaying Mithra or some universal Abraxas. Materialists were
satisfied with the worship of the Emperor or of the city of Rome:
idealists turned rather to Isis or to Christ.
One religion there was which might have answered the turn of the empire:
the pure and ideal monotheism of Judæa. But the cult of Jahweh was too
local and too national; it never extended beyond the real or adopted
sons of Israel. Even so, it gained proselytes of high rank at Rome,
especially among women; as regards men, the painful and degrading
initiatory ceremony of Judaism must always have stood seriously in the
way of converts. Yet in spite of this drawback, there were proselytes in
all the cosmopolitan cities where the Jews were settled; men who loved
their nation and had built them a synagogue. If Judaism could but get
rid of its national exclusiveness, and could incorporate into its god
some more of those genial and universal traits which he had too early
shuffled off--if {377}it could make itself less austere, less abstract,
and at the same time less local--there was a chance that it might rise
to be the religion of humanity. The dream of the prophets might still
come true and all the world might draw nigh to Zion.
At this critical juncture, an obscure little sect began to appear among
the Jews and Galilæans, in Jerusalem and Antioch, which happened
to combine in a remarkable degree all the main requirements of a new
world-religion. And whatever the cult of Jesus lacked in this respect
in its first beginnings, it made up for as it went by absorption and
permeation.
It was a Catholic Church: it stood for the world, not for a tribe or
a nation. It was a Holy Church: it laid great stress upon the ethical
element. It was a Roman Church: it grew and prospered throughout the
Roman empire. It made a city what was once a world. Whence it came and
how it grew must be our next and final questions.